Originally Posted by
conspiratemus1
It depends on a piece of information which you cannot normally find out: Was the winning bid, which fell through and resulted in the second-chance offer, just a random deadbeat bidder? Or was it a confederate of the seller (perhaps the seller himself in disguise) shilling up the auction to test what your maximum bid was?
I agree that is what you have to figure out and unfortunately eBay doesn't give you as many tools to do that as they used to. You can look a the auction results and see the stats of the winner (e.g. how many of the seller's auctions he has bid on); that can give you some clues. But in the end it is up to you to decide what it is worth; look at past auctions for the item and make a call; if you don'y accept the offer, it will be listed again and you will have another shot, but of course it may go for more! Either way, the seller has no option to lower the second-chance offer price, even if he wanted to.
I sell occasionally and have probably 5% of winners just not pay and not respond to emails, etc. The new system where buyers can't get negative feedback encourages this (as well as encourages shilling IMO) and it has increased since that policy was instituted. As a seller, I will often do a second chance offer when the winner bails to avoid the hassle of re-listing. I have never had anyone accept one though!