Eeeee I like that bay... (ebay.co.uk)

Member Name: Vialdana

Product:	ebay.co.uk
Date:	25/06/09 (18 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good place to buy and sell things

Disadvantages: occasional problems with buyers or sellers, and you do have to have paypal

I'm a huge fan of E-bay - not just because I like buying things, but also because of what it's helping people to do in terms of being more environmentally friendly without even realising that this is what they're doing. Buying on there is very easy and there are often various ways of paying from the obvious paypal to cheques and postal orders and in many cases the ability to collect something in person as well if you're close by.

For those who don't know, E-bay is an online auction site that has been around for almost 15 years now, and has become the largest online auction site in the world with divisions in most countries. You can sell items you own on there to people who might want to buy them either in just your own country, or across the whole world. Most items are free to list if you start the auction at 99p or less, and you can include one picture per auction for free as well which is good. If you want to start the auction higher or add more pictures then you do have to pay a bit more for the listing, but overall it's generally still not a lot (I've not listed actual fee's here as they vary according to the type of item you're listing - CD's and DVD's for example have a different listing cost to ornaments or clothes, and all the fee's can be found on the site quite easily too). For people who just want to buy it's quite a simple site to use, you go on search for the item you want, and then when you've found something you like you place a bid. You can set the maximum you're willing to pay if you want to, and the system will increase your bid at the increment rating shown on the auction if someone else tries to bid against you until they reach a figure that's above your maximum bid you've entered. You do have to take note of any extra costs like postage and insurance for example, but these have to be clearly displayed so it's quite easy to see what the total you'd pay would be.

Options like BIN (Buy It Now) are very useful if you don't want to bid on something but want a straight forward purchase, and many sellers like to offer this. Occasionally you'll also see an option to put in a best offer as well. This means that the item is available BIN at a price - say £10, but the seller is offering buyers the chance to offer a smaller amount which they can then choose to accept or not. I've used this feature a few times when buying things to help me lower the cost and it's quite a nice feeling when you're offer is accepted.

I've been a member of E-bay for about 5 years, and over that time I've seen it get better in many ways. The overall layout is much nicer than it used to be (although I'm not sure about their colours - a little clashing in places in my opinion!). And the ease of leaving feedback has also improved as has the ability to say if you think different aspects are good or bad within that feedback. I suppose my biggest issue with the layout is that I wish they'd stop fiddling with it. I do find it a little frustrating to get used to something and then have them change it six months later.

There have been some not so good changes too of course, the biggest one in my opinion being the inability of sellers to leave negative feedback for buyers. Now I only recently started selling on E-bay, and before that I obviously had only had experience of being a seller and how frustrating it can be when someone sells you something that either doesn't arrive, or isn't as it was described when it does turn up. From the seller's point of view there's a whole range of problems that you can experience which I'd never thought of till people who I knew who sold told me about them, from people bidding and then not paying, to paying and then saying their item never arrived. All of these are the sort of problems that you can deal with and I'm sure I will have to one day as when dealing with people there are always going to be issues occasionally, but you know I never ever dreamed that someone might buy something from me in order to revenge rate me until it happened! (An garment I'd bought that was listed as new with tags arrived and had no labels inside it let alone no tags and was obviously used - so I'd tried to deal with the seller and eventually left them negative feedback after failing to sort it). In return they bought an item off me, and then complained about it and neg'd me (gave me a negative feedback rating) without allowing me the chance to replace or refund. Thankfully E-bay were good enough to see what they'd done and sorted it - I wonder if maybe they'd done it before to someone else perhaps. Obviously this gave me a new experience of dealing with E-bay customer service, and I have to say it's very good. The system is a bit tricky to use the first time to report a problem, but they do look at things nice and fast and they seem to be fairly good at resolving issues.

One thing which E-bay brought in a short while back which is good for me as a customer because I like buying with Paypal, but which I don't actually approve of is that ALL sellers now have to accept Paypal as a payment option. Why don't I like that it HAS to be included? - Well basically because Paypal and E-bay are owned by the same people and so what they're saying is you MUST give people the option to use OUR payment system where we can charge you extra fees if you want to use our auction site. I don't see why they couldn't have left people to choose, I mean it doesn't do them any harm, and I'm sure they can manage without the extra fees.

The search facility on E-bay is really good in my opinion, for example when you're searching for clothes you can select by size, colour, item type, and price and by combining various different selections you can really narrow it down to items that are actually what you want to look at rather than having to work your way through 20,000 listings for women's clothing ending today. Overall as I say I really like E-bay, but one thing I think they should introduce is the ability to search products by NEW or SECOND HAND. That way I could be certain that when I'm buying from there I'm being really green by only buying pre-owned items and not new things that are being sold by companies.

Summary: The biggest online auction site in the world, so its going to reach a big audience if you list there