Most sellers turn on Best Offer the way you'd flip a light switch. You check the box, leave both threshold fields blank, and then spend the next six months deleting offers for a third of your asking price.
The feature itself is fine. It costs nothing extra beyond the normal fixed price listing fees.[2] The problem is that the two numbers doing all the work, the price you auto-accept at and the price you auto-decline below, usually get picked in about four seconds by someone who just wants to finish listing and go to bed.
Those two numbers decide how much of your margin walks out the door this quarter. They deserve better than four seconds. Here is how to set them from something real, and what the rest of the offer system is doing while you're not watching.
Start With Your Floor, Not a Percentage of List Price
Search around and you'll find plenty of advice telling you to auto-decline at 70 percent of list and auto-accept at 90 percent. Ignore it. Those percentages know nothing about what you paid, what your label costs, or what eBay takes.
Work backward from the number that actually matters: the lowest price at which the sale is still worth making.
Start with eBay's cut. In most categories the final value fee is 13.6 percent of the total amount of the sale, calculated per item, plus a per order fee of $0.40 on orders over $10 and $0.30 on orders of $10 or less.[8] That fee applies to the total, not just the item price, so any shipping you collect from the buyer is part of the fee base too.[8]
Now run a real item. Say you paid $18 for a jacket, you list it at $65 with free shipping, and the label runs you $9.
Sold at full price, the fee is $8.84 plus the $0.40 per order fee. After the label and what you paid, you keep $28.76.
Now decide what the smallest acceptable version of that sale looks like. If you won't do this one for less than $12 in your pocket, the math lands on about $46. At $45.60 the fee is $6.20, the per order fee is $0.40, and after your $9 label and $18 cost you clear exactly $12.
So $46 is your auto-decline number for that jacket. Not 70 percent of list, which would have been $45.50 by coincidence on this item and badly wrong on the next one.
One thing worth noticing while you're in here. Because the fee moves with the price, every dollar you give up in negotiation only costs you about 86 cents. Discounting hurts less than it looks like it does, which is an argument for countering rather than declining, and an argument against setting your floor so tight that nothing can clear it.
What Auto-Accept and Auto-Decline Actually Do
These are not two ends of the same dial. They behave differently and they fail differently.
Auto-accept fires on the first offer that meets or beats your number. eBay emails you and the buyer saying you've accepted.[1] That is the whole interaction. There is no pause, no chance to notice the buyer had four other things in your store, no opportunity to counter a little higher.
That last part is the real cost of setting auto-accept too low. If a buyer would have paid $58 and your auto-accept sits at $50, you never find out. The offer lands, the sale closes, and the $8 is gone quietly.
So put auto-accept near the top of your range, not near your floor. On the $65 jacket, something like $58 is reasonable: high enough that you're genuinely happy to take it on the spot, low enough that a serious buyer will land on it.
Auto-decline works on the other side and its job is your sanity. Anything under your number goes away without reaching you.
Sellers split on whether to use it at all. One community mentor put the case against plainly: "I have no auto declines at all. That could decline some multi sales where you are willing to take less due to them buying 10 more items."[6] That's a fair point if you sell the kind of inventory people buy in armfuls.
But the case for it is strong, and there's a detail most sellers don't know. The auto-decline message eBay sends is not a door slam. As one seller in the same thread described it, the decline "includes a polite encouragement to try again," and they had watched buyers come back two or three times before landing on a price that worked.[6] Your auto-decline is negotiating for you while you sleep. Another seller in the thread summed up the appeal in one line: "Auto accept/decline is far easier and 100% accurate."[6]
There's also a limit that keeps this from going on forever. Buyers get up to three offers per item in most categories.[1] So a buyer who opens low has two more swings, and your auto-decline is what pushes them to use them.
The Middle Band Is Where You Make Your Money
Set auto-decline at $46 and auto-accept at $58 and you've created a band. Offers between those numbers reach your inbox, and that is where your judgment earns its keep.
You get 24 hours to respond to an offer.[1] Counter, and the buyer now has four days to answer, because eBay moved the counteroffer window from 24 hours to 96 hours in the US and UK in March 2026.[3] eBay's stated reason was that the longer window leads to higher acceptance rates and more completed sales.[3]
That extra runway is mostly good for you, but it comes with a catch worth planning around. While an offer is outstanding, the listing is tied up, and sellers raised the editing problem immediately when the change landed.[3] Four days is a long time to be unable to adjust a listing during a busy stretch. If you're heading into a weekend where you plan to reprice or run a sale, get your counters out early rather than late.
You and the buyer each get up to five counteroffers.[1] Nobody needs five. Two is usually the whole conversation: they open low, you counter near the top of your band, they meet you somewhere sensible.
One more thing about accepted offers. The item stays available for purchase until the buyer actually completes payment.[1] An acceptance is not a sale. Do not pull the item off the shelf and start packing until the money lands.
Offers to Watchers Run on Rules Worth Knowing
Best Offer and Offers to Buyers get talked about as one feature. They are not. Best Offer is something you choose when you list. Offers to Buyers is a private offer you send to people already watching the item or holding it in their cart.[2]
The mechanics are specific, and they explain a lot about why sending offers works better for some sellers than others.
Your offer goes to the 30 most recent interested buyers, and eBay keeps sending up to 30 more every 48 hours until everyone watching has received it.[1] The offer is good for 96 hours or until the item sells, whichever comes first.[1]
The discount has to be at least 5 percent below your Buy It Now price.[1][2] Auction format listings and items with advertised price restrictions can't do this at all.[2]
The 5 percent minimum is the number to sit with. On that $65 jacket, the smallest offer you're allowed to send is about $61.75. You cannot send a token gesture. If you have 40 watchers across your store and you blanket them all with offers, you're committing to real money.
Which is why the trigger matters more than the tool. eBay currently pitches this as reaching the buyers most likely to say yes, and its own product team says buyers are ten times more likely to accept an offer when they messaged you first.[9][4] A watcher who asked a question about fit is a different animal from a watcher who clicked the heart eight weeks ago and forgot. eBay also added negotiation inside message threads in 2026, so that conversation and the offer can now live in the same place.[4]
The practical version: send offers to people who have engaged, and to items that have sat long enough that a price cut is clearly the next move. Do not send them to everything every week. You're teaching your watchers to wait.
The Automation You Did Not Mean to Turn On
Here is where sellers get surprised.
When you send your first offer, eBay offers to keep sending that same discount automatically to future interested buyers, and that option is presented already switched on. Sellers have reported getting enrolled without noticing, and there is no bulk switch to turn it back off across your store.[5] To find what's running, filter your Active Listings for the ones sending offers automatically, then handle them one at a time.[5] eBay's position is that it never sends an offer you didn't set up, which is technically true and not much comfort if you clicked past the checkbox.[5]
Store subscribers can also build rules that send offers automatically based on category, price range, and item condition.[2] That is a genuinely useful tool for a large store and a genuinely dangerous one for a mixed inventory, for the same reason a store wide discount is: the rule does not know which items you're already selling near break even.
Then there's the conflict nobody plans for. If you run a storewide sale, your Best Offer settings keep working right through it, and buyers will happily ask for a discount on top of the discount. A store owner raised exactly this in the eBay community a week before this was written, describing the flood of offers and "lowest price" messages during their 50 percent off events and wanting a way to switch offers off for the duration.[7]
There isn't a clean one. The workaround another seller gave is the useful part: use the Edit Best Offer option in the Actions menu on your Active Listings page, which sets minimums and auto-accepts as percentages of each item's current price, 200 listings at a time.[7] Because it works off current price rather than requiring an existing value on every listing, it's the one tool that can put thresholds back afterward without a spreadsheet.
The bigger point came from a buyer's perspective in the same thread: "Any time I see 'Best Offer' on a listing, that tells me the seller will take less."[7] If you're not willing to take less on an item, take Best Offer off that item. Leaving it on and refusing every offer just generates messages you have to answer.
Do the Pass Tonight
You don't have to fix your whole store to get most of the benefit. Offers cluster on your higher priced inventory, because that's where a discount is worth a buyer's effort.
So pull your ten highest priced active listings. For each one, write down three numbers: what you paid, what the label costs, and the smallest profit you'd still be happy with. Run the arithmetic from the first section and set auto-decline at that price. Set auto-accept close to your asking price, not close to your floor. Then check whether any of those listings are quietly sending offers you forgot you enabled.
Ten listings takes about twenty minutes. Next week do the next ten, and make the two threshold fields part of how you list from now on rather than something you fix later.
How ListForge Handles the Offer Math for You
The reason most sellers leave those fields blank is that doing it properly means knowing your net on every single item, and nobody holds that in their head across a few hundred listings.
ListForge keeps the numbers attached to the item instead, so the thresholds have something to be calculated from.
- Best Offer is part of the eBay listing settings, with fields for auto-accept offers at or above and auto-decline offers below, plus a check that stops you from saving an auto-accept that sits under your auto-decline.
- You can set an account level default so new eBay listings publish with Best Offer already enabled, rather than deciding item by item at midnight.
- Each item carries a Floor in its pricing section, and once you enter what you paid, Profit Projections show the estimated price, profit, and margin for each connected marketplace using that marketplace's fees. That is the number your auto-decline should be built on.
- With Sale Manager on, the Offers lane can send watcher offers, adjust your Best Offer thresholds, and respond to incoming offers on eBay. Every one of those moves is clamped to your floor, and if no floor is set, the engine refuses to act rather than guessing.
- You set the limits the engine works inside: a maximum offer discount percentage and a minimum number of days between offer waves, so it cannot send the same watchers a new discount every few days.
- Each lane can run on its own setting. Leave Offers on suggestions only and every recommendation waits in Tasks for your approval, or let it run automatically once you trust the bounds you gave it.
Offers are the one place on eBay where a number you set months ago keeps spending your money today. Give it a floor worth defending.
Try ListForge free at https://list-forge.ai
Sources
[1] https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/listings/selling-buy-now/adding-best-offer-listing?id=4144 - eBay Help: Adding Best Offer to your listing and sending offers to buyers [2] https://www.ebay.com/sellercenter/growth/seller-hub-discounts/offers-to-buyers-best-offer - eBay Seller Center: Offers to Buyers and Best Offer [3] https://www.valueaddedresource.net/ebay-best-offers-4-day-counteroffers - Value Added Resource: eBay Best Offers Move To 4 Day Counteroffer Expiration In US and UK [4] https://www.shopifreaks.com/ebay-updates-seller-initiated-offers-with-in-message-negotiation-second-chance-offers-and-a-96-hour-buyer-counter-window-to-drive-more-sales - Shopifreaks: eBay updates Seller Initiated Offers with in message negotiation, second chance offers, and a 96 hour buyer counter window [5] https://www.valueaddedresource.net/ebay-seller-initiated-offer-automation-clarity - Value Added Resource: eBay Provides Clarity On Seller Initiated Offer Automation [6] https://community.ebay.com/forum/selling-57920/topic/would-you-trust-ai-to-acceptdeclinecounteroffer-476366 - eBay Community: Would you trust AI to accept, decline, or counteroffer? [7] https://community.ebay.com/forum/selling-57920/topic/offers-while-running-a-sale-event-480144 - eBay Community: Offers While Running A Sale Event [8] https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/fees-credits-invoices/selling-fees?id=4364 - eBay Help: Selling fees [9] https://www.ebay.com/sellercenter/news/2026-september - eBay Seller Center: Seller News September 2026