In Reply to: Bartering Etiquette posted by cyberbirth on Tuesday, 16. November 2004 at 18:21 Bali Time:
by asking for a price from the shop keeper generally they give you a pretty ridiculous price for instance on a watch they will say 400,000 rupiah, we often laugh at them when they give us this price and you find that the seller will laugh with you and then they say we can talk about price, then we will offer around 15,000 rp as our first offer, and generally the reponse is " oh you rip me off, good price for you but not for me" "Give me better price" so our response to this is "ok then you tell me serious price, not silly price, serious price?" they often come back with a price in the vicinity of 140,000 the key is you have to know how much people are paying for the product and what you are prepared to spend on the item. We are prepared to spend 40,000 rupiah on the watch so when they tell us 140,000 we laugh again and this time in Bahasa Indonesian say " tidak, tilalu mahal" (this means no too expensive) by now they release that you sort of know what you are doing, they will try to get you to raise your price by saying " a bit more ok and we do deal" but if 40000 is all you are prepared to pay then stick to it. you will find in 90% of cases using this technique you will be sucessfull occasionally a seller will stick to their guns and go no lower, if we don't achieve the price that we want or feel the price is unreasonable we will tell them in bahasa (tidak tilalu mahal) and walk out of the shop, if they want the sale they will chase you down the street and keep negotiating with you otherwise they will let you go and this is an indication that the price you offered was to low and that next time you can offer a little bit more.
This is what we do each time we go to bali, and we are always prepared to pay more than what most people pay for items but we do barter for fun. On our recent trip 2 weeks ago, we found that when we asked the price on particular things for instance a hand bag they gave me prices of 50000 which is really low and it was what I was prepared to pay for the item and they opened with that price, so I barter for fun but never insult them by offering such a ridiculous price ie 10000 because they offered me such a realistic price straight away. But yet again I don't feel bad when a watch seller opens with a ridiculous price such as 400,000 for a cheap imitation, I will always go in with a first price of 10000 - 15000 then reach a realistic price after a bit of fun bartering.
Hope this helps