Ebay Questions

A few tips about ebay

1. A LOT of the iPod kinda products are stollen, so you can get them cheap

2. When buying something like an iPod ONLY buy from a person who has a good seller history (they need to have sold at least 30 or 40 items and have a feedback score of at LEAST 97% to be trustworthy)

3. Watch out for people selling iPods in a short auction (like a 3 days auction) as opposed to the normal 7 days

4. You can find lots of good prices on training shoes, flats, and spikes

Yes, there are scams on e-bay. One seller last year was selling Gold coins for about $200 that had a book value of over $2000. This seller had a 100% feedback rating, and had sold over 200 items, but all within the last month. This was a scam. Look for sellers that have a very good feedback rating over a long period of time. If you are buying a small item from an individual who sells an eclectic assortment of goods, you probably won't get scammed. If you are buying something for a too-good-to-be-true price, and they have been selling for only 2 weeks, then you are getting scammed.

I have bought lots of training flats, racing flats ans spikes on e-bay, and have never been cheated. There is always a risk, but it is very low with this sort of thing.

Spikes and flats are usually excellent buys on eBay. But they (we) are a very specialized market, unlike that for something totally fungible like a new-model iPod Nano.

As a general rule I recommend avoiding any eBay seller who asks for payment by money order. (Money order! Do you even know where to get a money order?) I can understand some folks not wanting to use PayPal, but if they don't accept personal checks either, they are probably crooks.

I bought a dvd from a guy on letsrun.com, who had great film of Pre's career. He steered me to ebay where I bought it. I 'joined' ebay, with my own account, just to buy the dvd. It was my only venture onto the site and this was over a year and a 1/2 ago. Fast forward to last month. I started getting angry phone calls, several from Australia, demanding to know why I hadn't followed thru on my purchases on their products. I explained to them that I knew nothing about-what they were talking about-but they all called me a liar. I contacted ebay security and apparently, some hacker had gotten into my dormant account and made a bunch of winning bids on items. (about 15 different ones). Needless to say, I had them 'lock down' my account to prevent future use, (I couldn't get them to close it, like AOL, they put every road block in your path and give you the run around, rather than close out an account, which was frustrating); I guess this is the 21st century eqivalent of the old prank phone call of yester-year, just done for laughs by some bored guy? (since they don't actually get any products that they bid on-without paying).

The easiest way to shut down your account is to sell a few items, take the money, and never ship the product. Your account will be deleted in no time.

Just make sure you only accept money orders!

good article on ebay fraud and how alot of it comes out of Romania, believe it or not and how ebay has sent investigators over there, with armed security.

beerslug wrote:

As a general rule I recommend avoiding any eBay seller who asks for payment by money order. (Money order! Do you even know where to get a money order?) I can understand some folks not wanting to use PayPal, but if they don't accept personal checks either, they are probably crooks.

Your statement that "they" are probably crooks is based on ignorance.

Yes, paypal is owned by ebay and is a conflict of interest in that they can control complaints by yanking money out of sellers account with no recourse. My brother is part of a class action suit against ebay because of this. (He has been selling over 10 years with thousands of positive feedback of 99.7%)

While he accepts personal checks, he has to wait for them to clear before sending out merchandise. He does not need to wait when he gets a money order. (You can purchase money orders numerous places in every town in america.) Recently, there has been some fraud with money orders, so these aren't even 100% safe.

If you want one key to a good seller, simply look at the length of time they have been selling. Anyone trying to scam people will not be able to last very long with the recourse buyers have to out them.

beerslug wrote:

As a general rule I recommend avoiding any eBay seller who asks for payment by money order. (Money order! Do you even know where to get a money order?) I can understand some folks not wanting to use PayPal, but if they don't accept personal checks either, they are probably crooks.

You can get a money order at any post office, pretty much every grocery store, and most gas stations -- all for under $1. People with bad credit who can't get checking accounts use money orders to pay bills, they are readily available and quite safe/easy.