Picking Up Some Art Or Antiques? Make Us An Offer, Says Amazon

Amazon has brought a little piece of the street market into the world of online shopping with the news that it will allow users to haggle over thousands of items.

The new ‘Make An Offer’ option will now allow users to bid lower prices on more than 150,000 items sold by third-party vendors on Amazon Marketplace, with fine art and antique coins among the listings on offer.

The new feature will only apply to items priced at more than $100, and will appear in Amazon’s Fine Art, Sport and Entertainment Collectibles and Coin markets.

Negotiable

Amazon says this is not an auction feature, as popularised by eBay, with the new feature allowing the buyer and seller to conduct private price negotiations and a customer will never pay more than the listed price.

Sellers have 72 hours to reject, accept or counter an offer from a customer. If the seller counters, the customer has another 72 hours to respond.

Items that can now be haggled over include an 1863 document signed by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, which is currently on offer $150,000, and a mint-condition baseball signed by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig which comes with a $10,000 price tag.

Amazon plans to expand ‘make-an-offer’ to “hundreds of thousands” of items in 2015 as part of ambitious plans to expand the reach of Marketplace, which currently accounts for around 40 percent of its sales.

The news comes just in time for the tail-end of the Christmas shopping period, however Amazon announced last month that it would be teaming up with the Post Office to ensure no deliveries are missed over the holidays. The company has agreed to add the Post Office’s 10,500 UK branches to its existing PickUp Locations service, which allows customers to pick up items they’ve bought online.

The company also announced in October that it would soon be opening its first real-world shop in Manhattan, as it looks to keep track with rivals. The Amazon store is expected to sell and display Amazon’s growing product portfolio including its Kindle line of e-readers and tablets, Fire smartphones and video-streaming boxes, as well as a mini-warehouse to support same-day delivery, returns and order pickups.

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