eBay Changes Offers Expiration To 24 Hours
eBay appears to have made yet another unannounced change - this time to timeframes to accept offers.
eBay has several different iterations of it's "offers" feature - Best Offer allows sellers to add an option for potential buyers to make an offer on the listing page. Offers to Buyers or Seller Initiated Offers allows sellers to send offers to potential buyers who meet certain criteria (added item to watch list, viewed item repeatedly, added to cart but didn't check out, etc.)
Previously, eBay gave a 48 hour window before offers expired. Then they added an option that allowed buyers to designate when their offer or counteroffer would expire (12, 24, or 48 hours).
However, sellers in the eBay community are reporting eBay may be once again changing things, now only allowing 24 hours.
Its interesting to note the current version of eBay's help page for buyers states 24 hours.
According the the Internet Archive, as recently as September 3,2021, this same page said 48 hours.
To make things even more confusing - the help page for sellers still shows 48 hours in multiple places as of today.
So which is it 24 hours or 48 hours? Is eBay giving different time frames to buyers than to sellers or have they simply not gotten around to updating all of the help pages after yet another unannounced policy change?
There has been an increasing trend for eBay to simply make these kinds of changes with no notice or announcement and sellers are getting weary of struggling to figure out what policy eBay is going to hold them to today that they were never informed had changed.
Also, as one community member pointed out, the 24 hour timeframe can be particularly frustrating when dealing with business sellers who may operate on a typical Monday-Friday schedule and not check messages or respond to offers over weekends.
My complaint is as a BUYER, not a seller. From experience (my feedback is split roughly 50-50 as buyer and seller) I know that large sellers, brick & mortar operations, etc., frequently DO NOT monitor eBay over the weekends, so the 24-hour offer limit is annoying as a buyer.
It's an arbitrary limitation that does nobody any good, so why have it? Why insert an artificial barrier between buyer and seller that can only reduce the opportunity for purchases?... especially since the 48-hour option was viable for years.
What do you think - is 24 hours long enough to accept an offer? Should eBay put out announcements for any and all changes to policy and help pages?
Sound off in the comments 👇
