Parm’s Place

Why I dislike eBay

I always get eBay recommended to me, but I always refrain from using it, I simply don’t like it.

That however isn’t a good enough reason so I thought I’d go that little bit further and try to explain.

I’ve had two experiences with eBay that didn’t turn out so well.
1) I was purchasing an XBOX360 game, the seller had a good rating and requested payment upfront via Paypal.
Unsuspecting, I purchased the game and awaited its arrival. Sadly, it never did.
After a week or so, the seller was no longer a registered eBay user and after reading the help guides I made my claim via Paypal.
Thankfully my claim was approved and I was refunded the entire amount.

That inital experience left a sour taste, what seemed like such a straight forward purchase turned out to be a long winded claim.

With that behind me, I figured although I’d failed at buying I’d have a crack at selling. Here’s where my second bad experience comes in.

2) I was selling a mobile phone. Being the first item I’d tried to sell, I did a lot of reading up on how to sell on eBay and made sure my listing was as good and relevant as could be.
Once my item was ready for sale, the bids started to roll in and everything was looking good. That is, until the last few minutes of the auction.
Before I knew what had happened, the bidding had gone from a respectable £150 to £600. Something clearly wasn’t right.

Soon after bidding had ended, I received an e-mail from somebody claiming to be from America who claimed he had won the bid as a present for a relative in Nigeria.
Soon after that I received another e-mail from Paypal advising that the payment had been sent to me.

Although the e-mails seemed pretty legitimate, I’d been around online long enough to know what’s right and what’s wrong. The e-mail from Paypal was clearly a fake.
I couldn’t help but wonder how many people must be caught out by these fraudsters each day. For users who are new online and are unaware, it must be so easy to get conned.

So, my first attempt at selling had gone pear shaped. I reported the user to eBay and to Paypal.
Although not managing to sell my item I was still charged a small fee for the listing by eBay and the frustration of trying to use the service successfully was becoming all too familiar.

Why me?
Why do I seem to attract the fraudsters? Well, I don’t think I do. I believe the fraudsters are attracted to new users who don’t yet have a buyer/seller rating.
By preying on the new users, their chances of pulling off a scam must clearly be higher.

So what does this mean?
In my opinion eBay isn’t a good service for casual users. If you’re a long time user and know all the in’s and out’s, chances are you’ll already have a high rating and will find it easier to use the service.
If you’re new to eBay all I would advise is be very careful. There’s plenty of people there just trying to catch you out.

There we go, that is why I dislike eBay.