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 👇
They deleted my necessary categories in favor of lame forced item specifics (harming my business tremendously) & now ruined my offers. Now in the new useless general category, I can go by 24 on each page, used to be by 200. Every change is detrimental to me. My simple sellers page was changed to a page requiring one click to get to anything I needed now takes 3-7, thanks for the upgrade jerks. And getting rid of seller negative feedbacks was the worst decision ever made at eBay. Now almost all searches show suggested results instead of what you typed in & just recently even parenthesis won't get me what I type in. eBay doesn't know more than me what I want to search for!
The people in R & D just sit around coming up with ideas to our detriment because that's what they are paid for, though they've ignored my every intelligent suggestion for 23 years, like being able to search auctions without reserves or with reserves met, having a button so you can look for an electronic or car etc.. WITHOUT getting parts only. They even cancelled Concierge's quick & easy US support, the only great idea they ever had & then sort of restored it to a lesser degree to some accounts. If it ain't broke, give them some time.
Yes! Sellers have been asking for years for transparency surrounding policy changes. eBay will do things like change their restricted items policy without announcing it so sellers are caught unaware with policy violations and listing removals. eBay changes timelines surrounding different processes so sellers never know how much time they have to take action on something.
Look at the User Agreement updates. This is an announced change, yet every year eBay fails to tell sellers exactly what changed in that long document. How is this acceptable behavior?
Does eBay expect sellers to read every policy page in full every day and compare and contrast to make sure they're compliant with all changes? eBay can't even get the policy pages correct when they make changes. I'm tired of it! Sellers are walking around blindfolded in the dark woods, slamming into trees and getting eaten by bears while eBay is holding hands, roasting marshmallows and singing songs around a campfire believing everything is great!
Does eBay expect sellers to read every policy page in full every day and compare and contrast to make sure they're >compliant with all changes?Great point! Ebay has no regard for hard working sellers' time and effort. Why can't they be bothered to roll-out simple summaries and clean-up their clunky online help pages?
