Here's a Surprisingly Effective and Simple Strategy for Buying on eBay: The key, a study found, is to make your offer a round percentage off the listed price.

 

"In some online negotiations, there is a simple way to boost your odds of getting a discount.

In a recent study, researchers looked at eBay transactions where buyers could either pay a listed price or make a "best offer" that was below the listed price.

When buyers did make a "best offer," they closed many more deals if the amount they offered was a round percentage of the listed price.

Let's say a seller was asking $34 for a product. An offer of $17 -- exactly 50% of the asking price -- stood a much better chance of being accepted than an offer of $18, or 53%.

Why? In these types of transactions, sellers usually don't field more than one offer at a time -- so the sellers are considering each offer individually rather than waiting for many buyers to make bids in a traditional auction.

And when sellers mull each offer individually, it is likely easier to mentally process an offer that's a round percentage.

"These round percentages seem to coincide with a higher percentage of getting a deal in the end," says Hannes Petrowsky, a research associate at Leuphana University in Luneburg, Germany, and the study's lead author.

The researchers studied more than 25 million eBay negotiations in 30 product categories -- about 45% of them were successful -- from 2012 to 2013. The goal: to see how buyers on the platform could get the cheapest offer without overpaying for an item.

(The researchers didn't examine traditional eBay auctions.)

Buyers who offered percentages that were difficult for the seller to calculate mentally, such as 51% off the listed price or 39% off, would close fewer deals than those who offered 50% or 40% off, respectively.

For instance, for every 1,000 offers made at 50%, 388 would lead to a deal, but for every 1,000 offers made at 51%, only 317 would lead to a deal. "When buyers offered exactly half of the list price, sellers tend to accept offers," says Mr. Petrowsky.

Offering 90% of the advertised price was most likely to result in a sale; the researchers found similar increases for those offering even percentages of 30%, 40% and 50% off the listed price.

The research -- which was published in the Journal of Economic Psychology -- found other trends in eBay deals.

For one, buyers making offers on items that cost more than $100 were more likely to reach an impasse than products that were priced lower.

And buyers who mimicked the precise endings of the asking price stood a better chance of closing a deal -- for instance, a buyer who offered $27.77 on an item priced at $37.77.

Buyers who used that strategy increased the likelihood of a deal by 5.5 percentage points. Prior research has shown that these precise offers make the buyers seem more knowledgeable but less willing to make concessions." [1]

1. Here's a Surprisingly Effective and Simple Strategy for Buying on eBay: The key, a study found, is to make your offer a round percentage off the listed price. Dizik, Alina. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 11 May 2023: R.2.