eBay (ebay.co.uk)

Member Name: StrongSide

Product:	ebay.co.uk
Date:	05/06/09 (10 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Find bargains, sell easily

Disadvantages: Scammers, eBay needs to take more action

eBay revolutionalised online buying and selling. Anyone can use it and it's very easy to understand how everything works, both as a seller and a buyer. You can literally buy anything from multiple countries from the ease of your home. It also has additional features such as community answer centres and discussions, a place to post requests for items you cannot find so that sellers can find a buyer straight away and About Me pages, amongst others.

More importantly, it has a feedback system which is of course absolutely vital. Before recently, you just gave a positive, a neutral or a negative and left a comment for why you left the certain feedback. Then they introduced stars on top of this, where you rate out of 5 stars such things like the seller's communication and how reasonable the shipping rates were. Now, the feedback system has been changed again and if you are a seller you can only give a positive to the buyer. This was so to stop sellers who got a negative from giving the buyer a negative as well even though they usually did nothing wrong. As you get more feedback points you get different coloured stars next to your name which was a useful idea.

However, there are problems with eBay. It has so many users that many scams and bad transactions happen without any consequences for the seller. I remember a guy scammed thousands of pounds by selling PS3s that he didn't have. A thread was made on eBay and they closed it as you're not allowed to have threads about a specific user!

eBay can be a fantastic place to find bargains and get rid of unwanted things but ONLY if you know how to use it safely and who to deal with. If you're new to eBay I would recommend only dealing with Power Sellers as there is pretty much no chance it can go wrong.

Summary: A great site but must be used carefully