I am quite an experienced hand at Carousell, for some years already. At this time of writing, my positive rating stands at 154. Check me out here. So, if you use such platforms, you would know the term or characters called low ballers.

If a product is listed at $100, bargaining for $90 is normal human nature. Bargaining for $40 is not exactly called bargaining anymore. It puts the word “bargain” to shame that netizens must have come up with such an alternative term: low-balling.  It means offering a super-low price relative to the listing price. It’s almost an insult.

Many people don’t like this, and one such offer is enough to turn them, normally a calm, collected person, into a morphing monster, not much unlike the zombies transformation.

But I’m not like that. I say $100, you say $40, I say NO, and we move. That is, IF you move on. I don’t hate low-ballers, but I hate the secondary low-ballers. What they do? After I have said NO, they will start to use some “secret” techniques of psychology, hoping to change my mind and maybe grab a good deal.

They will start to say: Hey, but Seller X is selling for $40. My retort: then why don’t you buy from Seller X?

In Carousell I mainly deal with smaller-ticket items, so, that’s not so bad. I’m also a software developer. Recently, someone chatted with me regarding a software development project. After he had given me the requirements, I studied them and gave a quote $x. He said it’s too much. Then he counter-offered. It was just 10% of my quote. It almost transformed me into a monster as well. But luckily I kept my head and just said NO, hoping we would just move on from there.

But no. Prospect turned into a secondary low-baller! He brought in Fiverr to his rescue to argue his point. Fiverr is basically a platform where people sell their services for $5 or so. (Nowadays, even Fiverr is just a brand name. Many of them don’t sell for $5 anymore. Or add-on this and that for extra costs.)

His reference really bothered me. What, he expects me to do his solution for $5 or so? Luckily, I kept my calm even at this secondary level (Anger doesn’t do any good, right?). I just pointed him to a blog of mine that talks about web developer salaries. Most probably, it won’t change his mind, but whatever I wanted to tell him is there already. So, at least it saves my time.

So, moral of the story for me: primary low-ballers or secondary, never get angry or pissed off, just give them a blog link.