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This
months article is going to be a little different than the previous
ones. Rather than looking on the selling or shipping side of doing
business on ebay, we are going to examine how to buy safely.
Generally before anyone sells something on ebay, they will buy
something. Doing an ebay purchase is generally the first exposure
anyone has with ebay. As I have previously mentioned, 90% of ebay
users only purchase items and never sell anything.
When you find an item on ebay
that you want to bid on, there are a number of things you should do
before committing to purchase anything from an ebay seller. Some of
these things will sound very basic, but you would be surprised how
many people do not do them and end up losing money to a scam. The
first thing you should do is check the feedback rating of the
seller. Their feedback number is that number directly behind their
User ID. In general the higher the number the better. Any seller
with less than a 100 feedback number will definitely require more
scrutiny than if they have a 1000 feedback rating. The next thing to
do is to actually look at his feedback profile. To do this you
simply click on his feedback rating number, and that will take you
directly to the sellers feedback profile. Once there, you want to
look at how many negative feedbacks they have compared to the
positives. Generally any number over 98% positive rating is fine.
Don’t be totally scared off if you see the occasional negative
feedback comment. Even the most experienced and honest sellers will
have the occasional negative feedback, simply because it is almost
impossible to please everyone. Generally I will not purchase from
any seller who has less than 95% positive feedback rating.
The next thing you need to look
at is how many of the sellers feedbacks are from sales and how many
are from purchases. One of the tricks some people use is to purchase
a lot of low priced items in order to boost their feedback rating,
before they start selling. So if most of the feedbacks are from
purchases I would be more inquisitive. Actually look at some of the
items that the user has purchased, if they are all low priced items
under a couple of dollars, then this user probably just tried to
boost his feedback and I would be wary of purchasing from them. If
his purchases are of significant dollar values then its more likely
he is a reputable user just starting to sell. You also want to check
out the items he has previously sold and received feedback for. Look
at those items and see if they are consistent with what they
currently are selling. If they have been selling inexpensive
downloadable ebooks for the last 3 months and they are suddenly
listing expensive jewelry or laptops, your spidy sense should start
to be tingling!
You also definitely want to
check out the other items the user currently has listed. If they
have 5 listings for the exact same high priced item, that might be
cause for concern. Then also look at their 30 day sales history, and
if they have sold the exact same item every week, that might also be
a reason for concern.
A classic example of what you
should avoid is a seller with a feedback of less than 20 who is
selling a laptop computer for half of what it should be selling for.
Then when you look at his current and past auctions, you see that he
currently has 5 other exact or similar laptops listed and has sold
the same items for the last 2 weeks. You would be surprised how many
people would send this user their hard earned money and will never
see a laptop.
In conclusion I would suggest
that until you are an experienced buyer, you only purchase from high
feedback sellers who have a proven track record in their feedbacks.
If there is interest, I can expand on safe purchasing techniques,
such as online escrow services and paying through paypal. Please
email me any suggestions you have for information you would like to
see in a future article. I would like to receive some feedback
to hear if people think these articles are useful or helpful.
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