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  • It's against the rules to perform fishing expeditions where you may sell the bike, but ultimately are just trying to gauge interest and potential price in advance... you're either selling the bike or not, and fishing expeditions fall under the "Not selling" category and aren't allowed.

    However, if you are selling you do not have to state the price in advance. So long as your intent is to sell, then you can have an advert that is open to offers. However, to pull that advert later because "No offer was high enough" would shift you into the fishing category and may result in your ability to place adverts in the future being removed.

    So: "Offers accepted" with no named price is fine, so long as you really are going to sell the bike when a serious offer comes in.

    If we dictated that every advert must have a price, then we'd end up with a lot of adverts being Dutch auctions. Whereby someone who is unsure of the value of their bike is encouraged to start high and constantly devalue the bike until someone buys it.

    I don't have anything against Dutch auctions, feel free to try them... but it would make Classifieds an even noisier place (many bumped threads hiding newer adverts), and would make the sales process have less dignity than it currently has. It would start to feel more like a flea market than "friends buying stuff from friends". So I don't necessarily want to encourage them heavily.

    Finally, there are many cases where people don't know the re-sale value of something.

    For example: I built a custom Bob Jackson from new bling parts, and held onto it for 3 or 4 years. I knew that what I'd paid was not what it was going to be worth. At the same time I didn't know how much someone would be prepared to pay for it and didn't want to lose more than was reasonable (1/3 depreciation is expected, 2/3 is extreme). So in my case I asked for offers precisely because I felt that the market would regulate itself according to what people were prepared to pay, and that I hadn't bought and sold enough (because I'd held onto it for so long) to know what the market price was.

    There is a place for "Offers accepted", so long as it's not a fishing expedition.

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