If you can't buy it on Ebay, it probably doesn't exist (ebay.co.uk)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	ebay.co.uk
Date:	24/05/09 (48 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Well established, well known company - best known online auction site of the lot?

Disadvantages: May not be able to successfully resolve inter-customer disputes

Personally I've been a happy Ebayer for about the last 6 years, and despite a few unfortunately negative experiences I've had with buying online there lately still continue to highly recommend it. My positive Ebay experiences vastly outweigh any negatives and I've found this to be an effective and usually reliable means of buying hard-to-get-hold-of and especially unusual items online.

Ebay is such a well-known internet auction site - where you can in my experience, get hold of almost any consumer item you can think of - that in this review I'm not going to comment on most of the general 'mechanics', rules or capabilites of the site - included are just a few personal observations I've had as a regular Ebay user from over the past several months.

First of all, recent changes - notionally 'improvements'- to the site - mainly regarding the search facility have made it slightly less user-friendly, in my opinion. Why can't the people who run sites like these just leave things that work well already, and with which people are already quite familiar, well alone? One of the ongoing mysteries mystery of our internet age, I fear, since my comments along these lines to Ebay just received a standard reply that stated something like - 'this way it will eventually be better for everyone, you'll see'.

Though it's not just a case of getting used to the new search engine; in my experience it really does work less effectively then the old one, and with a tendency to reset search parameters apparently arbitrarily (e.g. a search laboriously set up for a pair of 'new', and 'sz 9' shoes made of 'leather' for a toddler might suddenly and for little apparent reason revert to a search for any old shoes, worn and unworn, made of any material under the sun, for men and women across the whole of ebay) this can now be something of a pain in the neck.

Another issue that's gradually been coming to tick me off recently is with online retailers who use Ebay to list multiple, multiple copies of identical items - sometimes 20 or 30 of them or more almost all exactly the same - on the site. So an (inadvisably generalized) search for something like a 'boho handbag' might return 200-odd results, more than three quarters of which would be near-identical bags listed one after the other on page after page by professional sellers. I don't take issue with professional sellers trying to sell on Ebay and regularly buy from such sellers, but these frequent, multiple listings of identical items are as irritating as junk mail or spam, and increaseingly I am seeing more and more of them on Ebay these days.

There doesn't seem to be a straightforward method that I've located for excluding such multiple postings; private sellers often advertise items as being 'new' so a search excluding any new items would, while blocking the multiple merchant listings, miss potentially relevant items of interest. The only fairly reliable means I've found to block this king of listing is to limit the search to items sold by sellers in the UK or in the EU; since it is an unfortunate fact that many of the multiple listings to which I object originate from sellers in China and the Far East.

I've also found Ebay customer service representatives while polite and courteous, to be in general, not a great deal of use in resolving disputes. Emailed queries generally receive standard or 'by rote' - type answers; and there doesn't seem to be a lot the staff can actually do in the event of a genuine dispute. For example I was recently conned by a seller from the Peak District in England - very stupidly, at her request, I sent this woman cheque for £60 - which she cashed - instead of using Paypal. She then sold the same item I'd paid for on to another person and I was left out of pocket. Of course, I wasn't protected since I hadn't used PayPal and though Ebay did eventually send me a partial 'courtesy refund' - which I very much appreciated since it was not in any way their mistake - this did not by any means cover all of my losses. While the loss was entirely my own fault, I don't feel that Ebay dealt seriously enough with the dishonest seller, particularly in the light of what happened next.

I was so annoyed by what had happened that I turned Ebay amateur detective, and contacted a number of other disgruntled customers - by this time the seller had accumulated quite a raft of negative feedback. In this way - for while lisitng different items for sale, the silly cow had posted numerous pictures of the very distinctive interior and the very distinctive exterior of her barn conversion house; to the extent that I even knew what her carpet, the design of her three piece suite and her upstairs / downstairs colour schemes looked like (and of course since I had posted her a cheque I know exactly where she lives) - I found that she was selling under a number of different Ebay aliases from - as it turned out - at least two different addresses in that little village in the Peak District. I reported all this to Ebay customer services but despite stating that 'we take this kind of thing very seriously, you know' I don't believe that they were particularly bothered (hardly surprising, this, if they are basically call-centre staff) and in effect told me that there was nothing they could do till this woman's new aliases received yet more negative feedback of their own - till she ripped more customers off, in fact.

This sorry tale just serves to underline the pitfalls of Ebay; while it's a great concept when everything works OK if things go wrong effectively you're on your own. Although I understand this is not 100% watertight, refund wise, I've learned firstly to always pay by Paypal, and secondly, to always look for customer feedback about sellers in future. In knew this before, but unfortunately the woman who 'stung' me was apparently new to Ebay (or at least she was under that alias) and when I talked to her on the phone she seemed all right so I took a chance and lost.

Summary: Sometimes requires a leap of faith by buyers - and sellers....happily most people are trustworthy