Pushing closer to eBay’s model, Amazon has rolled out its own ‘Make an Offer’ option for buyers in several categories including sports collectibles, bringing a bit of the card show give and take experience online.
Expanding on Amazon’s traditional fixed price model, the new pricing feature allows customers to negotiate with the seller by making an offer at a lower price. To start, more than 150,000 items from sellers on Amazon are enabled with the ‘Make an Offer’ experience across Sports and Entertainment Collectibles, Collectible Coins and Fine Art. The new feature will expand to hundreds of thousands of items from sellers in 2015. Customers can browse ‘Make an Offer’ eligible items at www.amazon.com/makeanoffer
How it Works
Sellers enable the ‘Make an Offer’ feature for items to show customers they are willing to consider offers below their listed price for an item. When selecting ‘Make an Offer’ on an item’s product detail page, a customer can enter and submit a new price of their choosing. The seller will receive the customer’s lower price offer through email, at which point the seller can accept, reject or counter the offer. The seller and customer can continue to negotiate through email until the negotiation is complete. When a seller accepts a customer’s offer, the customer is notified and can place the item into their shopping cart at the agreed upon new price for checkout and purchase.
“The new ‘Make an Offer’ experience is a game-changer for Amazon customers looking for great prices on one-of-a-kind items, and for sellers looking to communicate and negotiate directly with customers in an online marketplace environment just like they do normally,” said Peter Faricy, VP for Amazon Marketplace. “In a recent survey of our sellers, nearly half of the respondents told us that the ability to negotiate prices with customers would be important to drive more sales on Amazon. ‘Make an Offer’ delivers that functionality and makes customers feel confident they are getting an item they want at the lowest price possible.”
Of course, opting to buy an item for the listed price eliminates the possibility that you might lose the item over a few dollars should you be purchasing a single trading card or one-of-a-kind item.
Memorabilia Company Support
The idea already has one major backer in Steiner Sports, which obviously likes the option of more potential sales a couple of weeks before Christmas. The company has now listed over 5,000 items listed with the Make an Offer option
“The ‘Make an Offer’ experience gives customers more control and better deals than they may have received prior to this program,” said Steven Costello, Executive Vice President of Steiner Sports Memorabilia, Inc., headquartered in New Rochelle, New York. “The negotiation experience will hopefully get more communication between us and our customers to help us better gauge the price for certain items. We love the ‘Make and Offer’ program, and it is only going to get bigger. Once customers know this is an available feature more offers will come, leading to more sales.”
Kit Young Cards, a long-time seller of vintage sports cards also had a large number of cards listed inside the ‘make an offer’ section. In all, a total of over 19,000 trading cards were listed as of Tuesday night
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