> I mean yould you do that: sending your credit card > information to a foreign seller, who has a feedback > rating of only 9 and who says this is the only paying > method he is willing to accept? > Probably not. And speaking about "insurance" (in an > other ebay posting) does this protect me from a > possible credit cart fraud from an ebay seller?
I've logged a modest 79 transactions on eBay, with a feedback rating of 76 positives, 0 neutrals, and 0 negatives. I was ripped off once (for $500, unfortunately), and the danger signs were there. You have to feel comfortable that you are dealing with someone who is on the up-and-up. Usually, if you see a price that is clearly too low and you can't account for that fact in your own mind, be very careful. If you have doubts, don't bite. I never deal with anyone who has a negative feedback rating of more than 2% (literally, I calculate it and do not make exceptions), and people without a generous number of feedbacks should just not be selling very expensive items. They need to build up a track record with less expensive items first. Other danger signs to look out for: people with a large gap between most of their feedback dates and now; people selling multiple expensive items at once; prices that are not just tempting but too low; pirated pictures or descriptions; people who will not communicate by e-mail (this is a big danger sign IMHO). One obvious but sometimes overlooked way of reassuring yourself is simply to ask the seller lots of questions: who are you, where do you live, how did you get the item, etc. Honest people will usually talk to you, and over the course of a back-and-forth correspondence, you can get a sense for the person's integrity. Of course it's not reasonable to expect a detailed correspondence from dealers or from large-scale sellers. In those cases, however, you can more easily rely on feedback. One nice aspect of eBay is that you can often get spectacular bargains because the seller either doesn't know what he has, or else has listed it in such a way that people who are looking for it won't find it. When I was buying my Spotmatics, for instance, I would routinely check under the search term "Sportmatic." As with any kind of collecting, knowledge is key. --Mike
