Reasonable e-mail response time?!

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dmc

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Recently, I received an offer to purchase a knife I had for sale. Great, I'll wrap it up. Keep opening up e-mails and I get the following note from the same guy "Actually, I'll back out of this since you haven't responded yet." Time of first e-mail with offer to purchase 05:24 07/02/02. Time of second e-mail backing out of deal 12:35 07/02/02. A little over 7 hours and the deal is off. Now nobody was hurt, no money lost, no hard feelings. Maybe the guy just got cold feet and wanted an excuse to not purchase.

What is a 'reasonable' time to wait before backing out?
 
I think you are probably right about the him getting cold feet. Either that or he is way to impatient.

If I did not get an answer to an offer that I made on a knife I would wait until the next morning and then email again. If I did not receive an answer to the second email, I would consider the deal terminated. If the person got back to me at a later date with a good reason for not having contacted me sooner, I would then decide if I still wanted the knife.
 
I would think that 24 hours is a good start, maybe even 36 hours, as I think that there might be some folks who aren't quite as "computer orientated" as some of us are, and they may not have home-access to a computer to check/send/receive their emails on a daily/hourly basis.
 
I agree that 24 hours is a good start, but what if you can see that the seller is/has been online? If I had not heard from a seller and he/she has been online, posting to the forums, I might think that the seller is waiting for better offers before accepting/rejecting mine. Should a buyer keep his/her offer open for 24-36 hours while the seller entertains other offers?
 
I admit, I am a bit obsessive about email(s)..I like to get things done, and I hate dragging them out, so I check my email repeatedly several times a day if I am waiting for a reply.
This being the case, I have had to learn to quell my impatience and determine what is a 'reasonable' time to wait, as opposed to what I would prefer.

I think about 24 hours is reasonable, and much less if I know for a fact that they are on-line and surfing about...
 
I think waiting a day or two for an email response is fine. Of course, I love it when transactions go super quick. Thanks to IM and Paypal, I was once (but only once) able to close a deal and ship the knife all within half an hour.

But how long should you wait for a response before you can consider a guy is no longer interested? On several occasions, I've received emails from folks saying that they are very interested in a knife and we communicate to the point where it seems like the deal is about set, and I agree to hold the item for him. But then the guy stops emailing me. Ok, maybe it's the weekend and he doesn't check his email outside of work. Then several more days go by and I email him again but no reply. In the mean time, I've been holding the item for him. But how long should I wait before I can conclude that he doesn't want it anymore? :confused:
 
I just recently purchased a knife from a guy who had a yahoo email account. I was not getting any replies from him and after further investigation I found that our firewall was blocking all email from yahoo. We had put some specific yahoo accounts on the firewall to prevent porn spam from coming through and for some reason it started blocking all yahoo accounts.

Just wanted to throw throw that out there and say in the world of computers, sh*t happens that may be beyond your control.

In this case a knife deal helped me fix a problem with our companies email system :D
 
I sometimes only check my e-mail once a day.I think 24 hours or even a few more is reasonable.
Dave
 
Reasonable is in the eye of the beholder. From experience, some people feel three - five days is a reasonable amount of time. I personally, grew up and live in a fast paced environment, one hour sometimes is too long of a wait! I have a trade going on that is on day 10; but the circumstances are reasonable and it'll be a few more days before it's done. I also had a trade happen within five minutes from initial contact to payment.

Everyone has different expectation. If I put something up to trade/sell, it would be wise for someone to hit me fast with an offer, I accept and they lightning the payment via PayPal. Done Deal before anyone else can hit me up with a higher amount, which would be nice.

$0.02 Enjoy your 4th!
 
I am now checking in on BF and my email for the first time in two days, not because I didn't want to check, only because things came up and this is my first opportunity. I check in maybe 10-12 times every two weeks.
In answer then, I believe AT LEAST 24 hrs is reasonable-
Martin
 
Okay, I am now more clear on what happened, so I let me just say this..

Backing out as quickly as possible is good, and especially before the seller replies accepting an offer to buy..that's a good practice, in my opinion. Less time wasted, no money sent, no offers accepted, no posts edited to say the item is sold, etc...

It would seem to me what the buyer was saying here was, " I made an offer, but since you have not officially accepted it I feel it's okay to back out"...When I first read it, I was thinking it was more a case of being impatient...like "I offered to buy it but since you can't be bothered to reply I am backing out".
 
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