I've been after a certain item on eBay for a while - but from a UK seller. There are loads of US sellers, but the postage on the item would be far too expensive. The only option was to wait for a UK seller to buy a bulk load and then purchase.

The item in question goes for about $50 (£25 or so) and that's what I expected to pay, plus, of course postage to a UK seller. The UK seller is selling at £80 ($160) - mainly because he has a captive market. What I did notice was that the seller also has the "make me an offer" button active, so I made what I thought was a decent offer (£50 including postage).

Having never used "make me an offer" before, the offer expires 48 hours after it has been sent - meaning the seller has 48 hours to decide whether or not the offer made is acceptable.

The seller did not even respond to my offer - of course, it could be that he/she sells on eBay part-time - so they might not even have seen the offer yet.

There's absolutely no way I'll pay the sellers asking price - it would be cheaper to buy from a US seller and pay for postage from US to UK. I do wonder why this UK seller has put the price so high, why they're using "make me an offer" and why they then don't respond to offers.

Of course the other option is to bulk purchase a bunch of the item and undercut the only other UK seller! But that's not interesting as it's too much like hard work