Can I detect "Dead" Best Offers?

GarageSale
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I know the problem of Best Offers shows up here frequently, but I found myself rooting around in the exotic Smart Folder and Javascript API stuff again trying to solve this use case.

What I want to do is detect running listings (1) which have watchers, (2) which I have already sent Best Offers on, but (3) where those Best Offers are not active.

By “active Best Offers” I mean that when I send a Best Offer to somebody, there is a (fixed?) period the offer is open, and if they don’t accept the offer within that period, the offer closes.

This does not appear to be detected by the Can Send Offer to Watchers criterion in the Smart Folder interface, maybe because according to the eBay rules, I can’t actually send a “new” offer to “old” watchers?

But when for example I select all the items I have running, with one or more watchers, and Revise those, eBay will return an error whenever there is an active Best Offer on an item, so it’s clear eBay keeps that information somewhere.

The use case I have is: If somebody is watching an item, and I’ve sent a Best Offer to them which they ignored, I’d like to bring that item back into my normal “random stop/start with randomized pricing” workflow.

Right now, I’ve been using “has no watchers” as the main filter criterion, and manually checking the ones with watchers to see if they’re still “alive”. I’d rather be able to just find the ones with watchers, and “dead” best offers, and combine those with no watchers.

Is this feasible in the API? Is it something Garagesale will already detect, and I just can’t work out the Boolean logic for it?

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After you have sent an offer to interested buyers, they have 96 hours to respond.
eBay says: “Each offer is valid for 96 hours or until the listing is sold, whichever comes first”.
So, I guess eBay won’t allow you to revise some or all parts of the listing during this time.

What you want to achieve would require some kind of smart group rule or script that checks the “days since offer sent”, right?

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It gets more complicated as buyers can decline an offer within that 96 hours, and then the listing can be edited [as long as there are no other offers out there for the item that haven’t been replied to]

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This feels like a can of worms, but the process by which I currently check—“can this listing be revised (with no changes)”—just feels like it might have an API response that happens very quickly? The error messages I get back when I attempt to change a “live offer” listing are usually incorrect and random, but intuitively it seems to use the same checker that fires when I am attempting to modify a listing too close to its close.

It’s funny, as a sometimes developer: Thinking about tracking 96 hours accurately for every listing, plus possible server-side state changes, feels harder and more complicated than just checking the mysterious (and possibly nonexistent) “can I be modified?” API for all of them when the standard updates occur.

Let me emphasize that I do have a solution: Just manually checking the items with watchers now and then (I usually wait until about 100 are sitting around). It works painfully but well enough, though it’s not a Smart Folder sort of thing.

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When trying to revise listings and they return the cant edit notice, I just change the “tag” on those that return the “cant edit” warning and keep hitting them every 24 hours until the 96 hours clears, since I don’t know when the 96 hours began. It would be neat to have a way to “see” the listings that have the cant edit 96 hour moratorium on them

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