Offers & negotiation

The order book is firm-price: a bid either matches an ask or it doesn’t. Offers are the negotiation layer on top — you propose a price below a seller’s ask, and the seller accepts, declines, or counters. This page documents exactly what each step does, what it costs, and where the guidance numbers in the offer composer come from.

Where this lives in code. The negotiation engine is apps/storefront/src/lib/market/offers.ts; acceptance economics come from packages/pricing (resolveCommission, computeCommissionAmount); escrow routing from lib/escrow/service-tiers.ts. When the mechanics change, this page changes in the same PR.

Making an offer

• Offers must be above £0 and at or below the ask price — above the ask you should just buy.
• One active offer per buyer per listing. At most 5 pending offerscan queue on one listing, so popular asks don’t drown the seller.
• Sellers can turn offers off per listing; those listings are Buy Now only and the card page says so.
• Your offer value is checked against your trading limits (per-trade and daily, from your trust profile) at submission — the same gate that applies to direct orders. See /methodology/trust-score.

How long the seller has

An offer expires within the seller’s declared response window— 48 hours by default, longer if the seller has set a slower cadence on their account. The exact expiry is stamped on your offer and shown in your offers inbox; we never promise a fixed hour count that a seller’s settings would contradict. See /methodology/response-windows.

Automatic responses exist.Sellers can configure pricing rules that auto-decline or auto-counter offers below a threshold. If your offer is answered within seconds, that is a rule acting on the seller’s standing instructions — not a human snub.

In production, creating or resuming an automatic pricing rule, applying one to a new offer, and every other new P2P commitment default to paused until the adult-account and operational human-review release boundary has been evidenced. Existing offers can still be declined or withdrawn, and existing trades can still be fulfilled or remedied.

What acceptance does

When either side accepts (the seller accepts your offer, or you accept the seller’s counter), a trade is created at the agreed price— the same trade object a direct Buy Now produces, with nothing skipped:

• Escrow routingis resolved from the trade value and both parties’ trust standing — Direct Ship, Verified Ship, or Full Escrow, with the tier’s photo requirements, dispute window, and payout hold written onto the trade. See /methodology/escrow-tier and /methodology/payout-hold.
• Payment deadline: the buyer’s declared response window (24h default) — miss it and the trade cancels, returning the listing to the book.
• Return terms are frozen: whether the listing accepts returns, and for how many days, is copied onto the trade at acceptance. Editing the listing afterwards cannot change a trade you already made.
• Acceptance is checked against the listing’s remaining quantity inside one database transaction — two accepts racing for the last copy cannot both win.

Commission on accepted offers

There is none. When an offer is accepted the seller keeps 100% of the agreed price — Cambridge TCG takes no commission, the same as every other market sale. More at /methodology/commission-rate and /methodology/fees.

The buyer pays the agreed price; there is no buyer-side offer fee. The rate frozen onto your trade is your rate at acceptance time— later trust or tier changes don’t rewrite past trades.

Where the composer’s guidance numbers come from

• Ask — the price on this deliberate public listing.
• Best bid — the highest deliberate public buy offer in the open order book.
• Catalogue reference— a labelled non-person reference observation. It is not a completed-trade statistic and not anyone’s offer. See /methodology/pricing for how the reference is built.
• Deltas(“12% below the ask”) are plain percentage arithmetic against the ask or catalogue reference. None of these numbers is a promise — they are context for your judgement.

Offers are always welcome. Sellers set their own auto-decline thresholds, so a low offer is simply declined rather than held against anyone.

Your fee

There is none. Cambridge TCG takes no commission, so the seller keeps 100% of the agreed price and the trade’s recorded commission_amount is 0. If a trade ever shows a non-zero commission, that’s a bug — email [email protected] with the trade ID.