Relative Offer

Relative offer is designed to maximize your offer revenue from low reserve or $1 reserve auctions. It makes the offer price relative to the sale price of the auction.

This feature is located under products -> products promotions view -> auction rules.

Relative offer will offer at the set amount, relative to the price the auction is won for. Negative and positive amounts can be entered as can $0.00 (the offer would be exactly the same as the wining bid).

When relative offer is set, the “offer” field now acts as the “minimum offer” amount.

For instance, consider this setup:

Example 1:
$1 reserve item
Offer is set to $20 (this now represents minimum offer)
Relative offer is set to $-1
If the item sells for $10 on $1 reserve, then the item will be offered for $20 as that is the minimum.
If the item sells for $30, the relative offer calculates an offer of $30-1, so the offer will be $29.Let’s consider another listing in the following example.

Example 2:
$1 reserve item
Offer is set to $20 (this now represents the minimum offer)
Relative offer is set to $0.50
If the item sells for $10 on $1 reserve, then the item will be offered for $20 as that is the minimum.
If the item sells for $30, the relative offer calculates an offer of $30+0.50, so the offer will be $30.50

Why do we do this?

If we just offered for $20 every time, which might be a fair price but offering for $20 is not ideal when the bit is at $30 because the next bidder likely just bid ~$29, that was how much they were winning to pay.

Couple that with the fact that OMINS sends out offers usually within 5-10 mins of the auction ending, you will most likely get a sale at $29 if you send an offer to someone who was willing to bid only $29 only 5 minutes ago.\

This feature gets the most revenue out of the offers on your low reserve or $1 reserve auctions.

Things to consider:

Slightly lower is good because it is likely to be close to what the losing bidder was willing to pay.
Slightly higher or equal to the highest bid might be a good idea. People bidding on the same product of yours on a few auctions might learn that you often offer slightly lower after the auction. They will not push the bid up, instead they will wait patiently for the slightly lower offer. If they know the offer is slightly higher they may instead bid hoping to get a slightly cheaper price, thus pushing the price up.

This post is also available in: Chinese (Simplified)