There are many reasons why a purchase will come OBO (or approve sale)

1. The buyer entered an unknown or incorrect zip code, in which the the shipping calculator did not recognize and therefore could not calculate shipping. It is sent for approval so that you can examine (get in touch with buyer) to confirm address. Please note, if buyer did miss enter their zip code, it is usually easier to cancel the order and have them try again with correct address. Or, their location is indeterminant and shipping cannot be calculated
Once an address or zip is entered the system will not allow a change…so you may have to invoice, cancel or just make sure that the correct address is in the payment processor…
This is for your protection so a buyer cannot change shipping location after the item has been purchased and you end up with more shipping costs

This means any error the buyer entered..that causes a system alert, will come as an OBO for you to consider

2. The OBO (or approval) will come through if the buyer is a location that you indicated that you do not ship. The system gives you a chance to decide whether to accept a sale in a location you normally would not ship to and to adjust costs accordingly

3. The reason many get OBO’s is because USPS calculated shipping is down which with the updates of the API web tools that occurred on Sept 7, I have have seen on several boards that shipping calculators were down or not working correctly on many different sale sites. So any time paypal, calc shipping or some other payment processor or even bonz is down for or right after upgrades, the OBOs come through so that you can try to save the sale

4. If all of your purchases are coming for approval then [URL removed]
Account Settings
Seller Settings
Scroll down to Other Seller settings

5. IF you want some items to be OBO and not others

Edit booth options
Purchases and Payments

Allow shoppers to negotiate and make offers (OBO)
Yes No

Mark this as yes

Then in the at the bottom of the listing(s) You do NOT want to be OBO uncheck the box next to the [URL removed]
Price Negotiable (uncheck this) and that particular listing is NOT OBO

I am also thinking due to the high cost of many of your items, there may have been an issue with the buyer’s credit card or account..and bonz wanted you give you a chance to investigate further…(this one is an assumption and not necessarily true)

Go to Edit Booth Options, click on Payments and purchases and make sure you have Yes selected where it says Allow items to be purchased immediately (“buy it now”). That should fix it.

Was the amount for the full price of your item? If they make a best offer, it will have to be approved by you before the sale….

I just had an issue today. I thought it was a straight sale. but it came to me for approval, which it was not supposed to….Then I saw that they made a offer on the item, but i did not have “OBO” checked on that item…..Now i think what is happening, is we cannot list single items with a best offer….if we have one item checked OBO, all our items are up for grabs with best offer, which I don’t think is right. So i had to go into my settings and set it to where no offers are allowed. Now i cannot even have one item with OBO. Doesn’t make sense if you ask me.

So not sure if this is what happened to you or not.