Why does everyone say "offer" when selling something?

I buy a lot of stuff at Kamadan and almost every seller says "offer" when I ask for a price. The seller should be setting the price and letting it go from there. Asking for offers just wastes time because I have no reason not to lowball them.


I know that they have a price in mind because after they reject my initial offer they'll tell me what they actually want. Do they think that by asking for offers, they'll get a crazy high offer one day?

They wanna see how much they can drag out of you. 99 percent of the time they will say "its worth more than that"

My reason is for probing the general buyers what they are willing to pay.
Usually a buyer offers less than the general worth of an item so I usually counteroffer roughly 40% higher keeping in mind we meet in the middle, so offered price+20%

Probably. Some potential buyers don't know the market very well and the seller hopes to take advantage of that. Other buyers may be in a hurry for the item and willing to offer an above-market price if the seller hasn't already quoted a market price.

Some sellers are not all that aware of the market, either, and may hope to get an idea of the going rate that way rather than asking for a PC.

Regardless, I find the behavior annoying, too. But, I just hate to dicker whether buying or selling. Others like it.

The whole Offer thing makes perfect sense when your selling really high end stuff. But when someone is selling junk worth a couple k at most, i just laugh when they say offer.

Whats worse is when they say "offer", you give an offer they dont like and they flame you and call you a noob and tell you to gtfo.

I like to make buyers offer sometimes just to figure out whos actually interested in the item and whos just trying to make a buck.

The proper response to "offer" is "1g".

If I'm buying something, I'm buying something. I've got money, I don't want to haggle and I don't want to play mind games when I could be playing actual games.

And since I usually only need mods these days, I tend to get more actual sellers than I can deal with anyway.

Because sellers wants to make the "highest" profit. Everyone wants to make money.

Regardless, I find this whole "offer" thing annoying. Tell me what you want for your item, if I can't afford it or don't like the price. No thanks.

I see what you mean, but you could also set an initial price that's higher than your intended price, with the intention that the buyer's counteroffer will be around your intended price.

This also works although initial high pricing tends to scare buyers off.
I like to make it a friendly back and forth untill we agree on a price, but thats just me.
Also note that: I'd rather just ask my going rate and have someone buy it, alas that does not work because 90% of the buyers try to undercut.

Shortly: I like the game, buy they asked for it.

because they are worthless money grabbers

Because without an auction system it's really hard to tell what things are worth if you don't normally buy/sell much of whatever the item in question is.

perhaps they can develop something similar to what WoW has. I never played WoW, but I watch my friend play and see him checking out auctions from the npcs.

Guild Wars market is just messed up nowadays imo ....way to many ''powertraders'' most of them trying to buy only high end weapons/minipets/El tonics.

Reason when someone selling says offer is :

1.Expects you to say a price OVER the price he already had in mind ...that way making profit.

2.Thinks that if he'll say the price , the buyer will get scared and look for the item somewhere else.

Basically people say offer on anything ....had persons telling me to offer on inscriptions and mods which is hiliarious in my opinion.

If you truly want to sell put your price next to item if you dont want to get spams with ''How much?'' ''Price?'', but then again some will still offer a price inferior to yours in the hope to make some profit.

Its because they hope someone will offer more than its worth.
Most people know what its worth and if you bid lower, they tell you "its worth more than that noob!". They are hoping someone will bid higher than it is worth so they can make a larger profit.

They either don't know the price or want you to say a number higher than the going rate.

Like novawhiz said, "offer" makes sense with really high-end stuff, simply because the market is so small. A lot of that stuff is really hard to accurately price-check.

But a good chunk of items (especially the stuff less than 50k or so) has a (somewhat) standard price range. It's my opinion that most of the people asking for offers on common stuff fall into three categories -
1.) They know very well what their item is worth, but are hoping for a big score from someone without pricing knowledge.
2.) They have absolutely no idea what their item is worth, and asking for offers is their way of getting a price check.
3.) Sort of a moronic subset of #2, I guess. They have a ridiculously inflated opinion of their item, and expect to get 25k for their req12 inscribable Holy Branch (or whatever). It's my experience that the "gtfo noob" flaming usually comes from these idiots.

Regardless of their motivation, all three groups are time-wasters, so I usually don't bother with any of them beyond asking "Hey, did you have a price in mind?".

ya its freakin annoying, stop doing it if you're reading this and you currently do it

In Party Search: WTB Jars of Honey.

I have 20 in storage but I don't have a clue what i'm gonna sell them for, if I propose a price i'm potentially miles out. It's far easier to shoot a PM saying "I have 20, offer?".

However, if you put up a WTS ad, then yeah, you should have a price you're ready and willing to quote people.

Everything to me is worth 2.5k unless the merchants and NPC-traders say otherwise.

There. Done. Anyone who doesn't like my offer can continue standing around chugging alcohol and munching on sweets.

Dibs on your next Silverwing/Frog/BDS/Eternal/w/e.