eBay users, how's your experience lately?

I'm getting very close to wanting to quit. eBay is not what it used to be in the 90s when everything worked pretty well on honor system.

It's now a haven for fraud and incompetent business practice. My buying experience has been poor lately and I've got screwed twice in a row, not necessarily losing money, but things turning bad because of someone else's unethical practice.

Buying Problem #1: Item not as described

Buying Problem #2: Fraudulent sale from hijacked accounts. This has happened to me like three times, required PayPal claim to resolve each time.

Buying Problem #3: There's no such thing as a good deal, thanks to shilling sellers. I wanted to bid, but I was pushed off the table from getting a fair deal thanks to shill bidding.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=200130213617
Look in bid history. If you've been eBaying for a while and you do a bit of detective work, you know right away shilling is happening.

That guy appears to be shilling on just about every item he sells.

Selling problem #1: Buyer changing mind and not paying

Selling problem #2: Buyer tries to talk his way out of completing the sale,then try to claim item is broken.

Selling problem $3: My listings getting ruined by Nigerian scams.

eBay used to get me a great deal on a lot of things, but lately it seems like every other transaction I'm involved in is trouble and I'm seriously thinking about quit buying things on eBay unless I REALLY have to.

Due to the reasons you stated, I basically never sell anything on eBay anymore. I still buy, but only from reputable sellers, and no where near as much as I did in the past.

I was quite active on ebay with mostly buying and a little selling but now I'm finding a LOT of BS out there and it takes a lot of time to find biddable items w/o all the cr_p attached, including ridiculous shipping costs. My buys have dwindled to almost nothing.
Even simple items require sifting thru page after page of BS to find an item source that 'appears' to be worth bidding on.

It's easier to find honest sales from merchants with posted prices.

The death of a good idea out of control.

search keywords not as responsive because sellers use words like surefire to describe whats NOT surefire or even AFFILIATED TO surefire:scowl:

and what the hell is with shipping costs?!

And good luck trying to find a "used" flashlight to bid on. It's all new stuff now.

The bargains are far-few IMO. Sellers have raised shipping rates to balance low item costs. Auto key fob remotes...puh-lease, I ship similar sized flashlight parts to CPF members for ~$2. They ship them for $6-$10.

Some of the sellers I've been using for years I stick with cause it's a known. Thankfully I don't go looking for many items.

I'm a buyer only - you need to have a bank card to sell anything, so I do not sell.
And other than getting sniped on (of all things) a set of Digimon episodes on CD-ROM a few years ago, I haven't had any significant problems save one: a seller that listed items as "orange laser diodes" but they were not laser diodes at all. All other transactions (539 of them to date) have gone smoothly, and I have no complaints about them.

The only real complaint I have along these lines is that they will not enforce their regulations. Filing reports has zero effect. The same vendors routinely engage in the same violations.:thumbsdow

thesurefire said:

Due to the reasons you stated, I basically never sell anything on eBay anymore. I still buy, but only from reputable sellers, and no where near as much as I did in the past.

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What do you consider "reputable sellers"? To an untrained eye, the seller of the item I linked is a role model eBay seller. 100% feedback and a power seller but anyone eBay knowledge will clearly see his shilling.

Illum_the_nation said:

search keywords not as responsive because sellers use words like surefire to describe whats NOT surefire or even AFFILIATED TO surefire:scowl:

and what the hell is with shipping costs?!

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That's annoying as hell too. It's true you consider the cost of shipping + item when you buy an item, but $0.99 item + $24.95 S&H with satisfaction guaranteed is a seller's way of avoiding defective item liability by only refunding 99 cents. Fortunately, these are very easy to spot for anyone who has the common sense to read the auction before buying and you can just look it over and decide to not buy it.

i don't sell on e-bay but buy a few things. have never had a problem, so far.

Recently I have been buying a bunch of powdered baby formula on ebay. I have saved significant money over buying retail but of all things I got scammed for the first time as well. Clicked on a buyitnow auction and a month later nothing had arrived, I filed a dispute with Paypal they found in my favor. I also found at least one other person who also was scammed in the same way by that seller.

I definately agree it has become almost impossible to find a deal on unique items. Now I mostly am look for commodity stuff at well below retail prices. That being said it still doesn't hurt to check ebay no matter what you might be looking for, recently I bought router mounting brackets for about $10 a pair whereas Cisco wants about $80+ for the same thing.

scooter said:

Recently I have been buying a bunch of powdered baby formula on ebay. I have saved significant money over buying retail but of all things I got scammed for the first time as well. Clicked on a buyitnow auction and a month later nothing had arrived, I filed a dispute with Paypal they found in my favor. I also found at least one other person who also was scammed in the same way by that seller.

I definately agree it has become almost impossible to find a deal on unique items. Now I mostly am look for commodity stuff at well below retail prices. That being said it still doesn't hurt to check ebay no matter what you might be looking for, recently I bought router mounting brackets for about $10 a pair whereas Cisco wants about $80+ for the same thing.

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Just like paypoop ebay is a bunch of BS:thumbsdow

I've been a buyer only, no significant problems but I don't buy that much
either. Wanted to buy a couple used music CD's and the shipping was like $6-7 for a $3.49 CD. I tried to get them to lower the shipping because I knew it wasn't over $2 and they said no so I said See-YA!

If you are a victim of shilling, you might not even know it.

Let's say you are willing to pay up to $100, and you bid for $100 and you won it for $85. You think all is well. Even if the item was shill bid up to $85 and you would have otherwise won it for $25, you wouldn't even know you were made to pay more than what it was legitimately bid up to without a thorough review.

Most of my eBay experiences have been positive, save two. I bought an MP3 player from a Hong Kong seller for $45 (shipped). It never arrived. I tried to file a complaint, but the seller suddenly was no longer a registered user. I bought a dual-deck VCR that was supposed to be free from the copy protection restrictions. It was not. The seller was planning on giving me a full refund, including shipping, but when he received the unit, he said I had punched a hole in the front of the VCR (I send it back in *perfect* condition) and charged me $58 for repairs. I sent the unit via UPS with insurrance and he said that he and UPS were absolutely certain that it was not UPS's fault, but mine. So, after 250-300 buying/selling experiences on ebay, only 2 were real disappointments. I've gotten a ton of killer deals on there. What I like to do, is find items I want that have a lot of listings with low starting bids. Usually, these are all from the sale seller. Then, I just keep bidding on them with a really low bid, until I win one. Sometimes, I'll bid on 10 auctions for the same item at the same time. I figure, even if I did win them all, I'd easily be able to sell them off because I had bought them at an unrealistically low price. Most of the time, I don't win any of them, but every now and then, I end up getting a steal of a price.

I've found some rather unique things on Ebay, such as JVC model RC-838JW, RC-M50JW, RC-M71JW, RC-M80, etc. ghetto blasters, a Commodore CBM8032 "all-in-one" computer, some rather uncommen glass insulaters (all of the above items are extremely uncommon to downright rare), Digimon episodes on CD-ROM, plush Digimon animals, etc., and more common articles like music CDs, lasers, flashlights, batteries, etc.

Boy, I don't know that I would ever want to buy Food/Baby Formula on-line:

Fake Baby Formula

Expired Baby Formula sold (labels placed over dates)

But expired Baby Formula was even found in stores... Be careful out there...

-Bill

Ebay...yikes...

Ebay has become the new clearing house for all things stolen, it's a Fence's dream.

If your house/car, etc has been burglarized, start looking on Ebay for your stuff.

I buy some stuff from there, mainly vintage stuff, but I also avoid the huge shipping/handling chargers and stay within the U.S.

--dan.

I've also only bought a few commodity items, stuff like special shampoo I use that I could get cheaper on ebay then thru something like Amazon.

I have bid on a few items of interest that I thought was a good deal but it seems like in every case at the very end there is a flurry of bidding and in all cases, the item sold for way more then I was willing to pay. Is this flurry of bidding in the last hour or two of a several day sale by design?

Also, twice I've emailed the seller after I bought and received the item, once with a question and once with a suggestion and in both cases the seller never answered back, is this common?

Regarding the VCR, what if you left very negative feedback, wouldn't they be concerned?

Trashman said:

Most of my eBay experiences have been positive, save two. I bought an MP3 player from a Hong Kong seller for $45 (shipped). It never arrived. I tried to file a complaint, but the seller suddenly was no longer a registered user. I bought a dual-deck VCR that was supposed to be free from the copy protection restrictions. It was not. The seller was planning on giving me a full refund, including shipping, but when he received the unit, he said I had punched a hole in the front of the VCR (I send it back in *perfect* condition) and charged me $58 for repairs. I sent the unit via UPS with insurrance and he said that he and UPS were absolutely certain that it was not UPS's fault, but mine. So, after 250-300 buying/selling experiences on ebay, only 2 were real disappointments. I've gotten a ton of killer deals on there. What I like to do, is find items I want that have a lot of listings with low starting bids. Usually, these are all from the sale seller. Then, I just keep bidding on them with a really low bid, until I win one. Sometimes, I'll bid on 10 auctions for the same item at the same time. I figure, even if I did win them all, I'd easily be able to sell them off because I had bought them at an unrealistically low price. Most of the time, I don't win any of them, but every now and then, I end up getting a steal of a price.

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