Best Offer Changes - what happened?

As many sellers discovered, on Monday we made a number of changes to the Best Offer feature.  This came as a surprise to sellers who use this feature on their listings, however, and many were concerned.   As of Wednesday morning (today), these changes are in the process of being rolled back.  To learn what happened, read on.

For those who don't know, Best Offer is a feature that allows buyers to make an offer on a listing for a price other than what is listed.  The seller can then accept the offer, decline, or make a counter offer.  (Read more about Best Offer in eBay's Help pages.)

One member on the Seller Central forum described the changes:

"Did I miss an announcement or is eBay just playing with us again.  My first Best Offer of the week arrived today and the following is new:
1) Buyer ID is partially hidden
2) Clicking on the Buyer's FB number takes you to a page where all transaction numbers are missing along with the ID's for their trading partners.
3) The text box for sending a reply along with your response is now gone."

No General Announcement to the Community was made, and the absence of any official word from us understandably compounded the confusion.  Affected sellers were left wondering what value the changes served: "It just mystifies me that the SELLER can't see the BIDDER.  I can't even SAY how mad that makes me. If I click that I accept their offer, I don't know who they are. On BIN they have to pay immediately, but if I accept the offer, the auction goes away as sold, even if they HAVEN'T paid."

The biggest concern for many was the fact that the truncated bidder User IDs left them blind when trying to evaluate an offer from a buyer.  Buyers with 0 feedback and low ball offers might be disregarded, whereas an offer from a faithful repeat customer might be eagerly accepted.  Many sellers left similar comments to this one left on the Stores forum: "If it is someone who has bought a lot from me before, I am willing to sell for less ....sort of a Thank You for all their other purchases. I give them a very good deal. Now I cannot even tell who is making the offer on the first 3 letters.

Rob Chesnut, eBay's Senior VP in charge of Global Trust & Safety, responded to a discussion started by a concerned Voices member about the Best Offer changes.  (Voices is a program that recruits buyers and sellers of all levels of experience with eBay to offer input on site changes.  Read more in a previous newsletter article.)  Rob acknowledged that the Best Offer changes were related to the Safeguarding Member ID project launched in January. 

SMI has been so successful in thwarting the efforts of scammers, Rob explained, that they (the scammers) have had to resort to other methods.  Rob said these latest changes to Best Offer were made by Trust & Safety team who is aggressively working to prevent the scammers from being successful:

"...we saw a new pattern where scammers were taking the user ids from bidders whose 'best offer' on high priced items had been rejected, and sending those potential buyers an official email saying that after some consideration, their 'best offer' had been accepted, and giving them instructions on how to pay (usually through Western Union)."

By Tuesday evening, however, the decision had been made to roll back the changes.  While the Best Offer could be used by scammers, the Trust & Safety team reconsidered their options in light of the problems being caused for sellers. In another note to Voices, Rob let the group know that his team had decided to restore Best Offer as it was previously until a more workable solve was developed. "We’re actually going to roll this change back and work on a better solution. In our effort to shut down the scammers, I think we reacted a bit too fast in this case. Sellers need to be able to see the User IDs for the buyers making offers, so we’re going to retool."

I checked in with John Canfield, Director of Policy Management, to get more insight and ask why the communication vacuum.  John made it clear that the lack of an announcement was an error. "In hindsight, we were moving so fast that we didn't follow our normal procedures for communicating site changes to our community. It's a reminder that part of delivering a great user experience is the 'no surprises' rule. Going forward, we'll take the right steps to make sure eBay's Customer Support and Community teams know about T&S changes so they can properly communicate them to our members."