Ebay just not what it use to be (ebay.co.uk)

Member Name: underdog_78

Product:	ebay.co.uk
Date:	09/07/09 (54 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to sell your items, easy to buy hard to find items

Disadvantages: Costly to sell, not much in the way or bargains to buy

For the few people that are out there who haven't used ebay, to put it simply it's an online auction site, where you can sell or buy almost anything, you pay ebay a fee if you're selling but nothing if you're buying.

It's not that simple but it gives you a rough idea of how it works, there are various payment methods set up to make buying and selling as safe a possible.

Using the site is simple enough, first you need to set up an account (which is as easy as signing up to hotmail etc) and then you can get straight into it.

Buying :

Buying is fairly easy, it's usually either an auction format, or a "buy it now" format.

The trouble with the ebay auction format is, these days, there's no real bargains to be had. most listings have a pretty high reserve on them, or even worse, the seller is using another account to bid their own items up higher, making the winning bidder pay more for the item.

Buy it now, is what it says it is, it tells you the price and you can click the button to pay that price for it on the spot so you know how much you're going to pay for the item and there is no waiting and watching an auction for days on end. However, most buy it now listings are real life shops selling their items (often at a higher price than in their shop to cover ebay fees) so again there is no real bargains to be had.

Selling on ebay

Selling on ebay is again fairly simple, a sellers account takes a little more effort to set up (you need to add debit cards details to pay your sellers fees). You then decide how you want to sell your item (auction or buy it now) set a reserve if you want (the item has to be bid over this amount to sell) and away you go.

Selling on ebay is a double edge sword. On the good side the audience it gets is massive and usually your item will sell for a decent price, but there are many downsides to it.

First no matter how long you run your auction for, almost all the bidding will be done in the last few minutes, this makes for 10 day listings being bery nerve racking.

Then when people do buy, you have to hope they pay, because if they don't you would have been charged for your listing and it's not easy getting this back off ebay.

If your buyer pays up and you post the item off, you then have to hope they are honest, because ebay (and it's partner paypal) are set up so that a buyer has no rights. If a buyer says your item is faulty, they will leave poor feedback (ebay's trust system) and get a full refund even if they can't prove any fault with the item. As a seller you will not be able to leave anything but good feedback for the buyer no matter what.

Even when all this is done, and with a bit of luck it goes well (as it does 90% of the time) you then have your ebay fees to pay. Let me sum up fees for you, you pay a fee to list your item, then if it sells you pay a final valuation fee, then when the buyer pays via paypal (which most do) you will pay another percentage on the payment. So selling really does come with a lot of hidden charges, and they seem to keep going up.

Ebay isn't all bad, but it's getting to the point where it's so expensive to sell, and so difficult to sell without any support from ebay should a dispute arise that it's often not worth it.

Summary: Ebay quite simply isn't as good as it was 5 years ago, which is a shame.