eBay Provides Clarity On Seller Initiated Offer Automation

A new announcement in the eBay community forums seeks to add clarity to how automated Seller Initiated Offers work, addressing common points of confusion and promising more enhancements are coming soon.

Seller Initiated Offer automation

Every day, eBay sellers send targeted offers to reach interested buyers and drive more sales. To make this process even easier, some sellers choose to automate their offers, helping them engage buyers faster and save time. We want to provide some clarity on how it works.

What You Need to Know

• You are always in control of your offers – eBay does not adjust prices or send offers unless you’ve set them up.
• Automation is optional – If you’re using ‘Send Offer’ for the first time, you’ll see an option to automate future offers to save you time. Whichever setting you choose will be saved the next time you send an offer.
• You can opt out anytime – You can search for and turn off an automated offer by going to Active Listings and filtering for ‘offers sending automatically’. Learn more here.
  
  

What’s Next?
We’re always listening to seller feedback and working on improvements. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be enhancing eBay’s offer management tools to give you even more visibility, control, and insights into your offers.

Stay tuned and thanks for being a valued part of the eBay seller community!

Despite the assurance that eBay is always listening to seller feedback, that announcement was a locked post which didn't allow replies - so sellers opened their own discussion thread about the topic, wondering why eBay is addressing the issue now.

Seller Initiated Offers Tech Post

I find it interesting that eBay felt that something needed to be said about this. I wonder if it is due to a recent glitch?

I say that because for the second time in weeks, I started getting counter offers for SIO's I made. Initially I thought this maybe something new, until I checked my SIO settings, only to see both the "Automatic" offers and "Accept Counter Offers" toggles switched ON.

Either I'm inadvertently turning both of those switches on when using the app, or it's their way of getting ahead of the complaints.

Others speculated the notice may have been to address common complaints from sellers who believe eBay enabled automated offers without their input only to find out they just missed that setting when sending out offers and didn't realize it was turned on.

I think the main drivers were the frequent questions/posts from people who think eBay is enabling automatic offers entirely without user input (when really it's just being enabled when they send offers, but it's admittedly a bad design that's easy to overlook and should be entirely opt-in and not opt-out like it is now), along with some type of changes being planned that hopefully will be for the best.

Of course we know many eBay changes don't actually work out for the best, but I feel like that's usually when they're unannounced or unintentional changes, as opposed to ones like this that are planned and kinda announced to us (though it's hard to call it an announcement of changes that are coming when they don't actually tell us what the changes will be).

My hopes are as follows:

1. That automatic offers would be entirely opt-in instead of opt-out and would not be enabled without manual user input.

2. That there would be a quick way to at least disable automatic offers that are currently enabled on active listings, and perhaps even a quick way to edit the offer being sent.
   
   

I know, it's a lot to ask, but one can hope!

That bad design and automatic opt in have been the source of much frustration for sellers - especially since once automated Seller Initiated Offers are enabled, there is no bulk editing option and sellers have to manually edit each item individually.

It would have been nice to have seen (unless I missed it) this information posted back when this started.

I was opted in without noticing the box was checked by ebay. It was my fault for not seeing the box, but then again, I had no idea this was coming either.

Then I had to go back and manually remove the automatic offers one at a time since I did not wish to use that feature.

What do you think of the current automated Seller Initiated Offers feature and what would you like to see eBay do to improve it? Let us know in the comments below!