Ebay Tips

Ebay

I have been on Ebay for more years than I can remember. My account is so old that I did not even have to have a credit card on account with them. Most of the time I sell things I do not need then buy things I need or to donate to a Church or School. My ebay name is bobdavis321. My feedback score is over 700 and over 99% positive. I did get some negatives back in the early days because stuff got broken in shipping.

First of all, before you even think of selling something on ebay, you must buy some things and get some positive feedback. Would you buy something from someone that has no feedback? Would you buy from someone you have never met before and will never see again? So set up your account and buy a thing or two, they can be real cheap, just to get some positive feedback.

Be aware that some people use bidding programs to add their bid just seconds before the auction closes. I have never used one of these programs but they do exist. They allow someone to instantly jack up the price with no time for you to counterbid. After the auction is closed you can go back and look at the bid history. I have seen auctions where several of these last second bidders fought it out. For this reason the "Buy it Now" option should be considered.

Always include a picture with your item that is for sale. It does not cost you anything, and helps to prove that you really do have the item that is for sale. A picture is worth a thousand words and may help to answer a lot of questions. Sometime it says that he does not know what he is talking about, or it may say that the item is better than described. If possible include a test page in the picture that will say "See it works!"

Ebay Scams

Years ago my boss took me to a Hamfest. I was instantly addicted. Every year I took a van or two of junk to sell at two or three Hamfests. Eventually I started selling everything for just $1 each. I figured that they were buying the stuff I could not fix and fixing it. NOT! The vendors were buying my stuff for $1 marked as not working, and reselling it for $10 to $100 marked as working without even fixing it! This practice eventually ruined the Hamfests. I learned to throw out the junk and only sell working items.

Ebay scams abound. There is the classic "Bait and switch". It is a Federal Offence but who cares? They advertise one thing and send another. All Paypal and ebay care about is that they sent you something and have the receipts to prove it. They could just as well send you a rock. But they would not send you a rock, the shipping would be too expensive. I have even emailed to verify the make and model number only to get a piece of junk that was a different model number. They just do not care.

For instance I have purchased four fast ethernet hubs on Ebay only to receive 4 slow hubs. They were purchased from three different vendors! The first did not give the model number. The second had a picture of a different hub. The one he sent did say 10/100 because it has ONE fast port, all the other 24 ports were slow. So the next time I verified both the speed and the model number with the vendor. Guess what? He sent a different model number that was slow. Then he told me that if I sent it back he would replace it with the correct model. Then he finally admits that he does not even have any fast hubs.

Another Ebay scam is to sell a good part to get positive feedback and then sell junk. This works real well with hard drives. Sell a working one "AS-IS" and make sure the feedback says it works. You can sell to a friend who lives nearby and save the shipping charges. You can even pay him to buy it and get it back. Then sell your junk drives and make a fortune. I have given into this scam as well. Never buy a used hard drive NEVER. They only last 3 to 4 years these days so any used ones are likely to fail if they have not already. Factory seconds are not much better. They are either too loud or thay had bad spots that are now hidden, or should I say "repaired"

Another scam is the $1 items that cost $25 to $250 to ship. This is an attempt to get around ebays seller fees. Since shipping costs are not included it the selling fees, some sick people will sell the stuff for $1 then charge the actual selling price in the shipping charge. Do not even think of buying from one of these crooks! If they would rip off ebay they will rip you off as well.

Another scam is to sell free stuff. If the item says "Not for resale", they likely got it for free, and are then selling it on ebay. A classic example of this is the HP 5L and 6L multifeed repair kit. HP gave those away for free, but they went for $5 to $10 on ebay. HP was partially at fault, they hid the free ones so deeply on their web site that not even I could not find them. So I bought the ones on ebay, it was cheaper than fighting with the HP web site.

Avoiding Ebay Scams

Like I said only buy from someone with lots of positive feedback. I have bought from people with over 100 positives to only have them take off with my money. Actually check their fedback, look for positives that were not really positive. Ignore negative feedback from negative or zero people. You can figure that one out of ten ebay deals will likely go bad. It goes with the territory. Currently the last five or six in a row have gone bad for me. I now have a collection of bad hubs, hard drives, and very yellow smoke detectors.

Only buy from dealers selling lots of goods with reasonable "Buy it now" prices. I get tired of bidding on things to be outbid. Sometimes I do a search only looking at the "Buy it now" prices. You can sort on price and select the best deal. You can also set up you search to only show things being sold that the quantity is greater that 4 or 10 so only the dealers selling lots of them will show up.

Verify the model number of the item before you bid on it. If the description is vague email the vendor and ask for more information. If they do not answer do not buy it! A lot of vendors are purposely vague to try to fool you, do not be a fool.

Look for unreasonable shipping prices! Ebay fees are based upon the listing price and the final selling price. Shipping charges are not included. So if they charge a fortune for shipping then ebay does not seem to know it and they do not collect any fees on it. I wish ebay would list the shipping price when you are searching for things, it would save a lot of time. If they use a shipping calculator, do not trust them without running the calculator. They are allowed to hide additional charges that will not show up untill you run the calculator.

I have bought lots of bad processors on ebay. Here are some hints as how to tell if they are bad before you bid on them. The first question to ask is Do they have a picture of the bottom of the processor? Notice the two in the middle, the top one has a small black spot, the botton one has a large burnt area. This is how they arrived from vendors on ebay, already toasted! Next, notice on the bottom left processor, the die is chipped away on the top left edge. Another thing to look for is paper stickers. Mose sellers put them on and if the processor is is overheated the sticker gets burnt. Most sellers will then remove the paper sticker to hide the evidence. One of these processors arrived with visible goo where they had removed the burnt sticker. One last thing is that even if the processor has no visible signs of damage it still may be bad. Two of the processors in this picture worked for a week or two, so I posted positive feedback, then they died. Some people overclock their processor untill is becomes marginal then quickly sell it before it dies.

Favorite Vendors

Some of my favorite vendors are justdeals.com for motherboards, palm54 for processors, maxpowerups for batteries, tonerkits for toner, and austinsurplusataol for processors. There are other good ones out there, but I have not purchased anything from them recently.