Before software, before marketing, part of my working life was spent in tourism and the bazaar trade in Morocco. It is not a background that shows up often in technology, and for a long time I did not mention it much.
That was a mistake. It taught me more about negotiation than anything I have read since, because in a bazaar the theory gets tested several hundred times a day by people with no obligation to be polite about the result.
Here is what actually holds up.
Negotiation begins long before the number
The single biggest misunderstanding people have about haggling is that it is about numbers. It is not. By the time two people are exchanging figures, most of the outcome has already been determined.
What determined it was everything before. How long the buyer stayed. What they touched. What they asked about. Whether they came alone or with someone whose opinion they clearly valued. Whether they were on a schedule.
A skilled seller in a bazaar is not calculating margins during the exchange. They are reading how much this person wants the object and how much time they have, both of which were established well before anyone said a price.
The business equivalent is obvious once you see it. The negotiation over a contract was largely settled during discovery. If you find yourself fighting hard over price at the end, the real failure happened weeks earlier, when you did not establish what the buyer actually wanted or what would happen to them if they walked away with nothing.
The first number is not an offer, it is a frame
Anchoring is discussed in every negotiation book, usually as a trick. In a bazaar it is understood as something more basic: the first number defines what kind of conversation you are having.
A very high first price does not mean the seller expects it. It means they are declaring a category. Everything after that gets measured against it, including the sense of victory the buyer eventually feels.
The part books get wrong is the emotional function. The buyer is not only trying to pay less. They are trying to have won. A negotiation that lands at a fair price with no movement often satisfies people less than one that lands slightly higher after real back and forth. I watched this play out constantly.
I am careful with this in business, because there is a line between framing and manipulation, and crossing it burns relationships you need to keep. But I no longer pretend the first number is neutral. It never is. If you do not set it deliberately, the other side will.
Walking away is a real position, not a bluff
In a bazaar, walking away is the most powerful thing a buyer does, and everyone knows it.
What is interesting is what it reveals about the seller. A seller who lets you walk without a word has told you the price was real. A seller who calls after you has told you it was not. Either way you have learned something true, which is more than most negotiation tactics deliver.
The lesson that transferred is this: your leverage is not your argument. It is your genuine willingness to not do the deal. If you cannot walk, no technique will save you, and experienced counterparties can sense it almost immediately.
Which means the actual work happens before the room. Having a real alternative, and knowing precisely what it is worth, is ninety percent of negotiating strength. Everything else is presentation.
Never insult the object
There is an amateur move that tourists make constantly. They criticise the item to justify a lower price. The stitching is poor, the colour is wrong, it is not really handmade.
It never works. It usually makes things worse, and I watched sellers become noticeably less flexible after it.
The reason is that you have just told the seller you do not want the thing very much. If it is that flawed, why are you still here? You have destroyed your own credibility, and you have insulted work that someone may have done personally.
Say instead that you love it and cannot afford it. That is a completely different negotiation. Now the seller is solving a problem with you rather than defending against you, and they will often find a way, because a buyer who genuinely wants the object is worth keeping.
I see the business version of this every week. Buyers who trash a product to get a discount, vendors who dismiss a competitor to win. Both signal weakness. Respect the thing, be honest about the constraint. It works far better, and it happens to be true more often.
The relationship outlives the transaction
The final thing, and the one that reframes everything above.
In a market where the same people trade beside each other for decades, a seller who wins too hard today loses tomorrow. Reputation is the real currency and it moves faster than any individual deal. I saw sellers deliberately leave money on the table with a customer they expected to see again, and I saw others extract everything possible from a passing tourist and then wonder why their business never grew beyond passing tourists.
That is the whole lesson, honestly. Most business negotiation is with people you will meet again, in an industry smaller than it looks. Winning a deal on terms the other side later resents is not a win. It is a debt.
The bazaar is often described as adversarial. The best operators in it were not adversarial at all. They were extremely good at reading what someone wanted, honest about what they could do, and playing a much longer game than the person in front of them.
I have never found a better description of good sales than that.
I am Issam Fathi, a technology strategist and the product manager of AssetEye by Dronetjek, based in Tetouan, Morocco. I help companies build, adapt, and grow through technology.
