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Comment by skocznymroczny | Hacker News Reader

I thought it's only a Polish phenomenon. It's bit of a meme in Poland, about services such as Olx. People try to haggle for every product. Let's say the price for a product is $300, you will have people messaging you with messages like "$50 and I'm there in few hours", often being aggressive if you refuse them. Also a common method is try to get emotional and lie to get a better offer, for example claiming to be a single mother who wants to bring joy to her child.

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The worst thing is when people come and start haggling right at the very end, trying to force you to sell at a lower price.

I started to flat-out refuse to offer ANY discount. You should have thought about the price before coming, not try to put a psychological burden on me and force me to discount the product at the last moment.

But yes, in general selling is painful (here in Poland). I find the lack of standardized packaging and shipping prices especially annoying. I could sell lots more if somebody took care of supplying standard boxes with standardized shipping pricing.

This used to be the case in Dubai when I used to live there. The defacto classifieds website in UAE is called dubizzle (dubizzle.com) which is a subsidiary of OLX. People used to use similar (in fact, worse) haggling tactics to get things for cheap. Couple this with spam and selling an item becomes a nightmare. On the contrary, I have had a far better experience on Kijiji and Facebook in Canada.

I've only ever had one person try to haggle with me on US Ebay but he was trying to buy all of my stock so it made sense that he wanted some volume discount. I've sold stuff on forums before and that is always a haggling experience. It's pretty much expected to have someone haggle with you even if you don't say OBO (or best offer). It's mostly good, sometimes people will throw in some goods to bring the cash price down or you might waive the paypal fees if they have a good reputation. You still get a lot of "PM me ur lowest price", like if you don't want to pay sticker price, you have to play the haggle game a little bit. I would always mark things up a bit more than what I actually wanted to get for it just so I had room to haggle the price down a bit.

People really love when they think they are getting a deal or somehow taking advantage of the seller so it's better to entertain them a little bit if it's going to get the sale.

>I would always mark things up a bit more than what I actually wanted to get for it just so I had room to haggle the price down a bit.

I always thought that was kind of the standard way of selling things in an informal situation. I just assume everyone's going to haggle or barter so might as well just do it that way. I get the price I wanted, they feel like they got a deal and everyone's happy.

On an aside, my grandma came from travellers. She was probably the best haggler i've seen. She managed to haggle in Sears and places like that successfully. She had this story about being a poor old Scottish pensioner. They also drove across Canada years and years ago with some of her relatives and would set up a fortune telling booth where they stopped. Her sister would case the people waiting asking about their lives, then my grandma would 'tell their fortune'.

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