eBay Best Offer: How to Set Auto-Accept and Auto-Decline

A lowball offer lands at two in the morning and you wake up annoyed by it. Then a fair offer lands on a Saturday while you are three aisles deep at a thrift store, and by the time you look at your phone it has expired on its own. Both of those are the same problem. You are the bottleneck on your own listings, and Best Offer has two settings built in that take you out of the middle.

What Best Offer actually changes

Best Offer is a toggle you add to a Buy It Now listing. The item keeps its price and can still be bought outright at that price. It just also gives a buyer a button to name a lower number.

That is worth understanding before you turn it on. You are not lowering your price. You are adding a second door for the buyer who was never going to pay full ask and would otherwise have scrolled past. On used, one-of-one inventory, which is most of what a reseller lists, a lot of people expect to haggle. Giving them nothing to haggle with costs you sales you never see.

The trade is that offers arrive on their schedule, not yours. An offer does not sit and wait indefinitely. If you do not act on it, eBay expires it, and the window is short enough that a day at your day job can burn it. That is what the two automatic settings are for.

The two numbers that do the work

When you add Best Offer, eBay gives you two optional fields. Most sellers leave them blank, which is the same as volunteering to answer every offer by hand.

Auto-accept is your happy number. Any offer at or above it is accepted instantly, no notification required, no decision from you. This is the one that closes sales while you sleep.

Auto-decline is your floor. Anything below it is rejected the moment it comes in. The buyer gets an immediate no and can try again higher. You never see it and never think about it.

eBay requires auto-decline to be lower than auto-accept, which leaves a band between the two. Offers that land in that band come to you.

Picking the numbers

The two thresholds should come from your cost and the sold comps, not from how you feel about the item. Work it in this order.

Start at the bottom. Add up what you paid, what shipping will cost you, and the roughly 13 percent eBay takes off the total. That gives you break-even. Your auto-decline goes above break-even, never at it or below it, because an accepted offer at break-even is free labor.

Then set the top. Auto-accept is the number where you would rather have the cash than the item. For most used apparel and hard goods that lands somewhere near 85 percent of your asking price. If you would take 34 dollars on a 40 dollar polo without a second thought, then 34 is the number, and there is no reason to make a buyer wait for you to say so.

Here is how that shakes out on a few price points. The take-home column assumes a 13.5 percent fee and does not account for shipping or the small per-order fee.

Listed at	Auto-accept	Auto-decline	Take-home on an auto-accepted offer
$25	$21	$15	about $18
$40	$34	$24	about $29
$60	$51	$36	about $44
$100	$86	$60	about $74

Those are a starting shape, not a rule. An item with thin sold comps and one buyer a month deserves a tighter floor. An item you have three of in a tote deserves a looser one.

The middle band is where you actually sell

The offers between your two thresholds are the ones worth your attention, and they are usually the ones that close. Someone offering 28 on a 40 dollar item is a real buyer with a real number in mind. They are not fishing.

Counter fast. A counter that goes out within an hour lands while the buyer is still shopping and still has your item open in a tab. The same counter sent two days later reaches someone who already bought something else. Speed does more for your close rate here than the exact number you counter with.

Counter small, too. Meeting in the middle of the gap gets accepted more often than holding at full price, and on a five dollar sourcing cost the difference between 28 and 32 is not worth losing the sale over.

Where to turn it on

You will find Best Offer under the price section of the listing form, right below Buy It Now. Check the box, and the two threshold fields appear underneath it. For listings that are already live, open the listing, choose to revise it, and add it there. You do not have to end and relist.

If you have a pile of active listings with no offers enabled, do them in a batch from the bulk editor in Seller Hub rather than one at a time.

Two mistakes to avoid

Do not set auto-accept at your full asking price. That does nothing, because a buyer willing to pay full price can just buy it. All you have done is decline everything else automatically.

Do not set auto-decline so high that it kills every offer that comes in. If nothing gets through for weeks, that is not buyers lowballing you. That is a price problem, and the fix is a fresh look at the sold comps, not a higher floor.

The takeaway

Set the floor from your cost. Set the ceiling at the number you would take today without thinking about it. Then answer the handful in between quickly, and let the software handle the rest of your negotiating.