Can Ebay Sellers be Trusted?

I wouldn't trust him/her.

I have a LOT of experience with eBay.

Never, ever, completely trust a seller who refuses to take paypal. Especially one who's asking for ONLY money orders or wire transfers. If he/she refuses to take paypal it's probably because paypal closed his/her account for fraud or something similar.

HOWEVER

That's not always the case. In some cases sellers don't take paypal because of the high fees paypal charges. But this is relatively rare.

My advice: review the sellers feedback very, very carefully. If they have more than 200+ feedback and 99% rating, you'll in all likelyhood be fine. Another thing to make sure is if the seller has a good history of selling high value items. Sometimes you'll get a seller who "fluffs" up his feedback with stupid trinkets and things not worth a lot. Then they put something like an LCD projector up for bid and rip someone off. If you see a lot of negative feedbacks (2 or more) in the past month, avoid the seller like the plague. I have encountered and bought many, many items that were "too good to be true" and i've yet to be burned. eBay is full of awesome deals, you just have to know who you're buying from.

The absolute safest route to go is only buy from sellers who accept paypal. Paypal will refund your purchase if the whole deal goes south. Guaranteed.

Please post a link to the item... I'll take a closer look at the seller myself.

PM me the link- i promise I won't steal it from ya.

So now that we aren't going to steal it, can we have more details than the shite you provided?

What was the original deal?

What was the trickery?

How does MP appear to be so smart and yet so dumb at the same time?

Don't leave us in suspense!!!

[shrug]

[blinks]

Hell yeah I wanna know!

i had thirty-forty+ good seller rating and didnt have a bad one until i sold this guy something(which was exactly what i posted and the product was known to be good as i tested it) and the guy reported me to ebay saying the items i sold em didnt work/ not the same thing as i put up in the auction. needless to say he got all the merchandise for free and my paypal account is still locked to this day(this happened about a year ago) because the user wont cofirm that i gave them their refund... which in essence i did but i wanted to make a counter claim, heheh no sir paypal doesnt have seller protection, they just automatically withdraw the funds form you account and then lock it until the buyer is happy...

i havent used ebay since, and i still have significant funds in my paypal account that i will prolly never be able to get to...

eBay also closed his account.

I didn't know that! Gary got ripped off on eBay eh? That's farking hilarious. You'd think he'd know better... what was he trying to buy?

Cool, I was just gonna do that after school. Oh well, I guess I'll have to work my butt of this summer and I hope to save enough for a decent laptop or PC for college...

He tried getting some old DJ mic from the early days. He ended up
having to get another one from somewhere else.

I've been using eBay consistently for over 3 years now.

I've never had one bad experience. My feedback is 142+... all positive.

As I said earlier, you must use some common sense and a little bit of skepticism when buying things on eBay. It's that simple.

Jess, I have an eBay question. I've purchased a grand total of 1 items from that place - a pair of golf shoes (from a big "clearance"/close out store). I "won" the bid (surprise) and called the place to pay with a CC (I will not ever use Paypal - see PF). They shipped the shoes, were a bit misleading as the pic showed a tan saddle oxford style (traditional):


and the shoes I received were a "taupe" (very light - a womans color) - but I kept them and said screw it, the price was good (half retail).

I didn't rate the vendor. And he hasn't rated me even though I paid by CC (phone) the next morning.

Does it matter if I never get a positive buyers rating?

This is a tough situation. I've been in almost the exact same position. I bought a pair of boots and they ended up having a rather large tear in them (not show in listing pic). The seller ended up refunding me and I sent the boots back. We both left positive feedback for one another.

If you've had the item for more than a couple weeks and you're generally happy w/ the purchase, I would just leave positive feedback and he'll likely do the same for you. (send him an email asking for feedback too) The other problem could be the seller will only leave feedback once he's received feedback. A lot of sellers do this, including myself. There are buyers out there who are ignorant, new, and just plain stupid. So I protect myself by making them leave me feedback first before I do so for them.

In cases like these, contact the seller and explain that the item(s) aren't what you expected. In most cases, if the seller has a good reputation, they'll work with you and either refund your purchase or replace your purchase.

I've probably got 30-40 transactions that buyers never left me feedback for. It's not 'cause they were displeased, it's because they're too farking lazy to bother with it. Or they expect me to leave feedback first (which I won't do)

eBay deleted all the "other" sellers after I reported it. before that they were still active accounts.

but I'm sure the guy has 100 other fake accounts; so probably not a big loss to him.

hell no. i've seen too many sellers get negative feedback for the dumbest reasons AFTER the buyer has received positive feedback from the seller. "shipping took more than 2 days" or "not what i expected" or "defective, doesn't work."

a lot of times this is how sellers find out there's a problem with the transaction. negative feedback. buyer never bothered to contact them about the problem.

these are not resolutions. most of the time the buyers never bother to contact the seller and tell them they're displeased. granted, some sellers may not give a shi*t. but they should at least be afforded the opportunity to fix the problem before some n00b leaves negative feedback after they're already gotten their positive. know what i mean?

just my opinion.

i personally would rather have NO feedback than bad feedback.