How to Respond to a Lowball Offer Without Losing the Deal

Economists who studied millions of bargaining exchanges on eBay’s US site from 2012 and 2013, using data eBay supplied, found that, in the offer-and-counteroffer exchanges they charted, the most common first offer from buyers was half the listed price, and almost half of all the haggles in the data ended in a sale.¹ The average first offer was higher, at about 61 percent of the listed price. Lowball offers are ordinary rather than personal: a number that feels insulting is often just someone’s opening move.

Knowing how to respond to a lowball offer, whether someone bids far too little for your car, sofa or freelance project or a seller asks far too much of you, rests on five moves:

1. Pause before you reply
2. Refuse to meet them in the middle of their number
3. Re-anchor with a figure you can justify
4. Ask what their number is based on
5. Know when to end the conversation

In practice the whole reply can fit in three sentences: thanks, a plain no to their figure, and your own figure with one reason the other person can check. Sample wording for a sale and for a freelance project follows in step 3.

These steps assume some basic homework: you know your target and what you will do if this buyer walks away. If those are still vague, start with the core habits of a good negotiation, then come back here.

Why a lowball number pulls harder than it should

A lowball offer works on you through anchoringanchoring: The tendency for an estimate or decision to be pulled toward a number seen beforehand, even an irrelevant one. It is one of the effects that held up when large teams ran the original experiments again.Full entry in the glossary, the tendency for whatever number is mentioned first to become the yardstick for everything said afterward, even when you know it is unreasonable. The Program on Negotiation, based at Harvard Law School, defines the habit as giving too much weight to that first figure and adjusting too little away from it.²

The classic demonstration came from the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the 1970s. People watched a roulette wheel stop on a number, then guessed what share of UN members were African countries. Those whose wheel landed on the higher number gave estimates nearly twice as high, although the wheel obviously had nothing to do with the answer.³ Experience is no shield either: in a 1987 study by Gregory Northcraft and Margaret Neale, estate agents shown a house with different listing prices were swayed by that price as much as students were, while denying that it had influenced them.³

Why does a random or silly number stick? The Columbia Business School professor Adam Galinsky, cited by the Program on Negotiation, explains that when value is uncertain, a low anchor draws attention to an item’s flaws and a high one to its strengths.² A buyer who offers far too little for your used bike gets you thinking about its scratches rather than its new chain.

Opening low has a cost for the person who does it, too. Pooling 90 studies in 2025, Petrowsky and colleagues tied bold first offers to better deals for the people making them, but also to more deadlocks and to worse feelings on the receiving end; in two new experiments of their own, the authors report, anger drove that damage.⁴ For you, the useful part is the anger. Your own irritation can end the deal just as easily, so name the feeling to yourself and set it aside before you type.

In practice, that can be as simple as reading the offer, closing the app and replying an hour later.

Your own irritation can end the deal just as easily, so name the feeling to yourself and set it aside before you type.

Most lowballs are an opening move

A lowball offer usually tells you more about the buyer’s hopes than about your item’s value. In the eBay data, sellers turned down about 4 in 10 first offers outright, accepted about a third and countered the rest, and after a refusal, buyers made a fresh offer in more than a third of cases.¹ One of the authors worked at eBay’s research lab, and the data cover one US platform over one year.

One reasonable reading of that pattern, though the paper does not test it, is that many low openers expect a refusal and are probing for your limit. The data come from the US only, but a seller in Melbourne listing a dining table on a local classifieds site, or a student in Lagos selling a used phone, may well meet the same kind of buyer: someone who opens low because it costs nothing to try. So treat the offer as information about how keen they are, and reply as if the conversation has only just started.

How to respond to a lowball offer, step by step

The five steps below combine experiments on anchors with advice from negotiation teachers. No one has tested this exact sequence in a trial on real sales, so use it to get ready, not as a promise of a price.

1. Pause before you reply

Give yourself time before you answer. The Program on Negotiation’s advice on countering is to resist the urge to respond immediately, ask for time if you need it, and check your best alternative and your target before you reply.⁵ A reply typed in the first minute is easily shaped by their number and your annoyance; a later one has room for your own.

A pause is easy online and fine in person. On eBay’s US site, a seller has 24 hours to decide on a Best Offer before it expires.⁶ Face to face, “Let me think it over and reply this evening” is an ordinary sentence in almost any market.

2. Refuse to meet them in the middle of their number

A tempting mistake is to counter from their figure: they offer a third of your price, and you reply with something halfway between. That split quietly accepts their number as one end of a fair range. The Program on Negotiation, drawing on the Harvard professor Guhan Subramanian, advises making clear that the offer is unacceptable before naming any figure of your own, for example, “I’m not trying to play games with you, but we are miles apart on price.”²

It then adds a caution: move quickly to your own proposal, because mentioning their anchor explicitly and repeatedly might validate it.² One sentence of refusal is enough.

Each reply on the right keeps the attention on your evidence rather than on their number.

The evidence for looking at your own numbers first comes from Adam Galinsky and Thomas Mussweiler.

The study

Limited evidence

Looking elsewhere erased the opener's edge, in three 2001 experiments

Across three bargaining experiments by Galinsky and Mussweiler, the negotiator who named a price first tended to finish ahead, whether buying or selling, and where the opening offer landed strongly predicted where the price settled. The opener’s advantage vanished when the person receiving the offer thought about facts that cut against it: the opener’s alternatives, the opener’s lowest acceptable price, or their own target. The pattern appeared both face to face and by email.⁷

This guide could consult only the paper’s abstract, which describes experiments rather than real sales. Still, the finding fits a 2000 study by Mussweiler, Fritz Strack and Tim Pfeiffer, in which experts who listed arguments against a given figure were less influenced by it (also checked through its abstract).⁸ Before you reply, write down your target and two reasons their number is wrong.

1. Their offer: far below what the item or work is worth; treat it as their opening move, not as the new range
2. The reflexive reply: a number halfway between their offer and your price, which quietly accepts their figure as a fair starting point
3. Your re-anchor: a figure tied to evidence both sides can check, such as recent prices for similar items or the scope of the work

3. Re-anchor with a figure you can justify

After a short refusal, name your own figure, close to your target, and say why it is fair. The Program on Negotiation calls a persuasive reason the way to re-anchor the talk and avoid a deadlock.⁵ The strongest reasons are facts the other person can check: recent sale prices for similar items, the age and condition of what you are selling, or the hours a project will take.

Reasons can backfire when they are easy to argue with. In experiments by Yossi Maaravi, Yoav Ganzach and Asya Pazy of Tel Aviv University in Israel, published in 2011, when a seller justified the asking price for an apartment, buyers who could easily bring the relevant facts to mind made tougher counteroffers than buyers who had been distracted.⁹ So choose facts that are hard to argue with, and leave out weak ones that invite a quick rebuttal.

The freelance reply works because it attaches the fee to what the client gets. Setting that fee in the first place is its own skill, covered in value-based pricing for freelance projects.

When you are the buyer facing a price that is far too high, the same logic applies, with one twist. Research by Alice Lee and Daniel Ames of Columbia, as summarized by the Program on Negotiation, found that sellers were more swayed when buyers explained their own limits, such as a budget, than when they ran down what was for sale.⁵ A buyer can say, “I like it, but my budget for this is lower. Would you consider this figure?”

4. Ask what their number is based on

A question turns their figure from a fact into a claim that needs support. Roger Fisher and William Ury’s book Getting to Yes recommends insisting on objective criteria, meaning outside standards like market value or past precedent, and searching for those criteria together with the other side rather than trading bare numbers.¹⁰

Ask it with curiosity, not challenge: “How did you arrive at that figure?” or “Which listings were you comparing it with?” Sometimes the answer reveals a real problem you had missed, such as a newer model on sale nearby. More often it reveals nothing solid, and you can return calmly to your own evidence. Either way, you learn something before giving anything away.

5. Know when to end the conversation

Every exchange needs a floor you set before it starts. Fisher and Ury called the fallback your BATNA, your best alternative to a negotiated agreement: the thing you will do if no deal happens here, such as relisting the item or waiting for another client.¹¹ In the Program on Negotiation’s view, a strong alternative gives you the confidence to reject extreme anchors and, when no agreement looks possible, to move on to your next-best option.¹²

Platforms can hold the floor for you. eBay, for example, lets sellers set an amount below which offers are declined automatically.⁶ Other marketplaces offer different tools, so check the settings where you sell.

End with the door open: “Thanks, I don’t think we can make this work at that price. If anything changes, you know where to find me.” In the eBay data, buyers who were refused often came back with another offer.¹

Before you reply to a low offer

• Wait until the irritation has passed
• Write down my target and my walk-away point
• Note two reasons their number is wrong
• Find one fact they can check, such as recent sale prices
• Draft a one-sentence refusal, then my own figure and its reason
• Prepare one question about how they reached their number
• Decide what I will do if they do not move

Download PDF ↓

Get this checklist as a one-page PDF. We'll email you the download link.

Your emailAlso send me the weekly newsletter (launching soon)Email me the PDF

We use your address to send this link and, only if you tick the box, the newsletter. Privacy policy.

Which moves rest on experiments, and which on advice

Each row describes what happened on average in the studies, which says little about how any single buyer will behave.

The firmest evidence is on how strongly anchors pull; the evidence on how to resist them is thinner and mostly comes from experiments rather than real sales. The steps above are the best-supported habits available, not tested guarantees.

The bottom line

When a lowball offer arrives, wait, refuse it in one sentence, and name your own figure with a reason the other person can check, instead of meeting them halfway. Ask how they reached their number, and know before you start the point at which you will politely end the talk and relist, wait or look elsewhere.