ChannelAdvisor has taken eBay's Best Offer feature one step further for sellers by automating the review process of offers received. The feature utilizes an "API call" that does not appear to be widely available to other developers as of yet. Implemented last week, the feature has had a positive effect on Average Selling Prices, according to the company.

eBay's Best Offer feature, optional for sellers, allows shoppers to make an offer on eBay fixed-price listings, for example, offering $90 for a listing priced at $100. Sellers can choose to accept the offer, reject the offer, or ignore the offer. If the seller accepts the offer, the listing ends with eBay treating the Best Offer bid as a Buy It Now bid with the Best Offer price.

With the eBay Best Offer feature, sellers manually review offers by logging into My eBay. Last week, ChannelAdvisor rolled out a feature in its auction-management service enabling sellers to automatically accept or reject offers based on criteria set up ahead of time by the seller.

The new ChannelAdvisor feature gives sellers the ability to define price thresholds at which to accept, reject with an email response to the bidder (for "reasonable" offers), reject without an email to the bidder (for "unreasonable" offers), or manually review offers. For instance, sellers may automatically accept offers that are 90 percent of the BIN price or greater, but may chose to manually review offers that are between 75 and 89 percent of the BIN price. Sellers can set thresholds individually for each product (SKU).

eBay only allows one Best Offer per item in most categories "to help ensure sellers get only serious, fair market offers from prospective buyers." eBay allow three Best Offers per item in its Business & Industrial category and 10 Best Offers in eBay Motors (the only category where sellers are automatically opted in to Best Offer).

Max Leisten, ChannelAdvisor's Senior Product Manager of Marketplaces, said sellers have already seen a slightly higher average selling price on using Best Offer listings. In some cases, he said, sellers are restricted by agreements with manufacturers from listing products at prices lower than MAP (Minimum Authorized Price), but if they are offered a lower price, they are free to accept it. Best Offer allows them to comply with manufacturer requirements while satisfying consumer's desire for a bargain.

ChannelAdvisor President and CEO Scot Wingo said his company uses eBay's API (Application Programming Interface) to interact with the Best Offer feature.

http://pages.ebay.com/bestoffer/faq

Clarification: ChannelAdvisor has informed us that the Best Offer threshold may not be configured by SKU but rather is a global setting for all inventory a merchant manages through its application. For example, if a user decides to define 90 percent of BIN as the minimum price at which to accept an offer, then 90 percent applies to all items.