Price war! You know those are two words I love, and right now Amazon and eBay are in a big time fight. Ebay that made its mark with auctions, where you would bid things and it’d be an auction period, and all that. In recent years has morphed very heavily into where you can “Buy it now.” In fact if you go to eBay you’ll see with so many sellers there’s the option of going through the auction process or just click to Buy Now.
Amazon has always worked the other way. Amazon just had a price and you bought it. Amazon has a larger and larger marketplace of independent sellers that sell through Amazon, so now Amazon is taking a page kind of from the eBay playbook. You can go to make an offer and items are available for sale and then you can do an offer to the sellers, say “hey, will you accept this instead of what you asked for?” It’s a painless way for you to see if you can get a lower price so put Amazon and eBay into competition for your wallet. I’m Clark Howard.
