Behind the Scenes: How Lury Decides to Accept, Counter, or Decline an Offer

The Question Every Merchant Asks First

Before installing a negotiation tool, almost every merchant asks some version of the same question: "What actually happens when a shopper hits submit?" It's a fair question — you're handing pricing decisions to software, and you want to know the rules before you trust it with your margins.

So here's the honest, unglamorous answer: there's no AI making judgment calls, no machine learning model guessing what a customer will pay. Lury's negotiation engine runs on three plain rules you set yourself. This post walks through exactly how it works.

Rule 1: Offer Meets or Beats Your Floor — Instant Accept

Every product, collection, or storewide rule you configure in Lury has a floor: the lowest price you're willing to accept. When a shopper's offer is at or above that floor, Lury accepts it immediately. No negotiation, no delay beyond the review animation, no discount applied beyond what they offered — they simply pay the price they named.

Rule 2: Offer Is Close But Under Your Floor — One Counter

This is where most "make an offer" tools get complicated, and where Lury deliberately stays simple. If a shopper's offer falls short of your floor but is still within range — specifically, at or above 70% of your floor price — Lury sends back exactly one counter-offer, set at your floor price. The shopper can accept it or walk away. There's no second round, no back-and-forth haggling.

That 70% threshold isn't arbitrary — it's the line between "this shopper is genuinely trying to find a deal we can both live with" and "this offer isn't close enough to be worth countering." Below it, countering just wastes everyone's time and signals your floor is negotiable further than it is.

Rule 3: Offer Is Too Low — Decline, No Counter

If an offer comes in under that 70% threshold, Lury declines it outright rather than opening a counter it's unlikely to close. This matters more than it sounds: a counter-offer implicitly tells the shopper "you're in the right neighborhood, try again." Countering every lowball offer trains shoppers to always start absurdly low, since there's no cost to fishing. Declining clearly, without a counter, keeps that incentive in check.

Merchant Controls: You Can Turn Off the Counter Entirely

If you'd rather run a strict accept-or-decline model with no middle ground, Lury's offer behavior settings let you disable counter-offers altogether. Some merchants — particularly in categories where showing any flexibility undermines pricing credibility — prefer this. Most keep counters on, since a single fair counter recovers a meaningful share of near-miss offers that would otherwise be lost sales.

Why Transparent, Opt-In Beats "Black Box" Pricing

It's worth drawing a distinction here, because the two get lumped together and shouldn't be. Dynamic pricing — where an algorithm silently adjusts the price a shopper sees based on their behavior, device, or location — has a trust problem. Gartner reports that 68% of US consumers say they feel "taken advantage of" when they learn a brand uses it, and 80% say brands that hold a steady price are more trustworthy. A 2026 UK survey found 65% of shoppers dislike dynamic pricing outright, with only 4% saying they like it.

Negotiation is different because the shopper starts it. They name a price; you respond with a rule they can see the logic of — take it, get a fair counter, or hear no. One analysis of algorithmic pricing acceptance found that simply explaining the factors behind a price measurably improved how customers felt about it. Lury's whole mechanic is built around that same principle — nothing happens to a shopper's price without them asking first.

The Bottom Line

Accept at or above your floor. One counter between 70% and 100% of your floor. Decline below that — no counter, no games. That's the entire engine. Set your floor thoughtfully, and the rest runs itself. Install Lury and see exactly how your first offers get evaluated.