Amazon Trial a new 'Make me an offer feature'

They are calling the 'game changer'. How will eBay fare?

Tuesday 09th December 2014 By Chris Glasspool

Amazon the online retail Giant have released information about their upcoming 'Make me a offer' feature. This will enable prospective buyers to effectively haggle with sellers in the Amazon Marketplace over price. Amazon are calling this a 'game changer' as it will bring them in line with the likes of eBay and other 'auction style' retailers. 

This move is two fold in reality as not only will it change the marketplace for current sellers it may also become somwhere new sellers are willing to venture once its fully fledged. The Seattle based firm have created this new feature to try and create a richer online shopping experience where customers feel comfortable about haggling over the price of an item. 

Amazon announced the launch of this feature stating that its starting out with 150,000 items from the Sports and Entertainment collectables, Fine Art and collectable Coin categories but plan on moving that to hundreds of thousands of items by next year. At present sellers of items in those trial categories have to elect to activate the feature much like you would on eBay when listing an item. 

The process appears similar to that on other auction sites in that the customer inputs a price they want to pay and the seller is notified and can respond. This all takes place over email (I believe internal Amazon email) and can continue until the deal is made or the buyer moves on. Once the seller agrees the customer can then select the item they have effectively bid on and place them into their shopping cart. 

Not only will this enable sellers to shift some items that perhaps they were unsure of the value on it also gets sellers items onto a landing page specifically for the make me an offer items. When competition for impressions and clicks is massive this is a great source of free traffic to their items and is likely to increase sales for a lot of sellers in those categories. 

Amazon do stress that this isnt an auction, this is customer and seller negotiating on price in private and nothing more. They also state it will only ever be applicable to 'one of a kind' items and not mass produced items like CD's,DVD's or electricals.

There are quite rightly concerns though, the sellers have 3 days to respond to offers and during that time the items are still live and able to be purchased at full price or even at a higher bid. Of course other customers wont see the price you have offered but that wont stop sellers from declining yours in favour of higher bids. 

To read more and see what sort of items are eligible visit Amazon.com now.