I have been with Ebay for about 5 years now and originally set it up after one christmas way back in 2008 to sell my unwanted gifts and raise some cash to help in my first away from home living experience. I remember a friend raving about the site saying you can buy and sell almost anything; I'd only ever heard of it once before in 2005 when we put our school up for sale as a prank but I never fully understood how it worked.

So you set up an account with your name, address, phone numbers etc and if you want to sell you must register a paypal account. Ebay and Paypal guide you to each page and guide you through the steps. Registering to the site is free.

Once you have mustered up a new and exciting user name and Ebay have welcomed you into the fold you can begin whacking on your unwanted items and declutter your life. I mainly use the app when buying and selling as it is so easy; you just tap on sell and item, write in a title and Ebay finds the category it belongs to. From their you take a lovely model shot (of the item not you!), write a bit about it and decide on a price. Now under 99p there is no listing fee but over this and each price category has an incremental charge, I think over £20 is about 50p now. Anyway once thats done please weigh your item and check postal costs with Royal Mail as you do not want to charge too little for postage and fork out from your own pocket!! Also do not overcharge on postage as there is a lot of that these days, I paid £2.99 p&p to recieve an item that turned out to have cost them 60p to post and they wrapped it very poorly so the item was broken.
Sometimes Ebay limits the postage which you can charge on certain categories which is very annoying as then the items price has to be raised and often the item will not sell. I find it ridiculous as if a book weighs over 1kg you cannot charge the correct postage.

If your item sells congratulations now pray you get paid. Over the years there are more and more people who set up accounts just to take the st michael and waste your time. So many accounts end up as 'no longer registered' and I have been left with about 40% of items to be resold and in my way due to these immature people. If this happens make sure you open a case in the resolution centre for unpaid item or set it up to open automatically after 7 days and Ebay takes care of the rest and you get your sales fees back.

A really poor feature is the lack of negative feedback for buyers, if a buyer wastes your time, is rude or lies surely that warrants negative feedback? However, no matter how dirty or scheming the buyer the customer is always right in Ebay's eyes!

Paypal also takes a cut of your profits.

Buying can be great on Ebay but can be equally as useless. It is a simple process where you search for the item you require then you can add it to a watch list (ideal if it requires bidding upon). To buy you either bid (to be successful I normally put a good bid in around the 30 seconds left mark) or buy it now. Once you win or buy the item Ebay takes you to Paypal and you pay there. Now I have also had experiences here where buyers put loads of items for sale, I win the auction at a bargain price and pay but then I recieve nothing, hear nothing and have to go through the process of getting refunds. Hmmmpf.

Feedback is fairly simple but unfair. You can only leave positive feedback for buyers no matter how awful and rude they are. Most buyers are absolutely fab but then there are the odd ones who regularly try to say items are broken and damaged (check their feedback left for others history) to spoil my 100% positive feedback history no matter how I try to help. Ebay is also unreliable as I have tried to leave negative feedback for a seller who overcharged me p&p and who was unresponsive leaving the items damaged through poor packaging and Ebay automatically set it to positive which is very odd.

So over the past 5 years I have made a lot of money which has helped me through my student days but it can be hard work and annoying. Ebay are largely unhelpful and when sent emails or phoned they dont answer your questions and tend to make up random answers which frustrates me. For some reason I also have no buyer protection so when a seller rips me off I have no recourse and no safety net which Ebay prides itself on.

WARNINGS: do not buy outside if ebay or post cash etc.
Do not go over budget when bidding, stick to a price.
Often when buying from China the item will not turn up.
Tell the truth and please do not rip people off as it is not nice!