I joined eBay in March 1999 and have been a regular user since then, selling mostly books, magazines and records. As others have said in their reviews, once you start it's easy to get hooked. I probably spend more time on eBay than any other website.
The auction categories are pretty good, and do get revised. For example, when I first started using eBay there was no eBay category for soccer, but the sports categories have been greatly improved. Sometimes I list items on eBay.com and sometimes on eBay.co.uk depending on which I think offers the best category to list my item in. There are slightly different choices on the US and UK sites, to reflect local interests, I suppose.
Remember that if you do list in pounds on eBay.co.uk the listing and final valuation fees etc. will be calculated and charged to your account in dollars.
There's some free software called Mister Lister available to download - this allows you to prepare details of all your auction items offline and upload them to the eBay site all in one go. Very handy if you do a lot of selling.
I'm happy to stick with the basic services, but there are loads of optional extras (at a price) for featuring auction items. Occasionally I'll pay the extra for boldface listing and feature in the gallery if I think something I'm selling is really woth it, but otherwise I rely on choosing my title and description words carefully so they'll be picked up by eBay's indexing and show up in search results.
eBay's system for handling problems with bidders/sellers seems to work well - luckily I've only had to use SafeHarbor once in two years, but it's good to know help is at hand.
They're closed for maintenance every Friday morning (which is why I'm writing this review on a Friday morning instead of playing on eBay!). In fact this morning's scheduled maintenance has resulted in my receiving an end of auction notice I should have had last Tuesday [though I'd already dealt with that particular transaction without waiting for the notice], so that proves they're doing something out there t okeep things up to date!
I've only started buying on eBay in the last couple of months, and have found PayPal a very convenient and secure way of paying for items both in the UK and abroad. PayPal now allows you to register a UK bank account as well as a credit card. eBay also recommends another system for payments called BidPay, but I haven't tried that.
eBay has built up a good reputation for quality. It's a name people all over the world have come to know and trust. I have had a look at other auction sites but haven't bothered to use them because I think eBay reaches the parts the others haven't even heard of :) When looking at other auction sites I get the same feeling as I did when I rode the pirate adventure ride at a popular British theme park a couple of years ago: to me it was a poor imitation of EuroDisney's Pirates of the Caribbean.
One person's junk is another person's treasure - you never know what's going to attract the bidders. So clear out the garage and the attic and get trading!
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
The listing and final valuation fees on eBay.co.uk are charged to the seller's account in US Dollars, converted according to that day's exchange rate.
The fees are displayed in pounds and pence, but when the charges are applied to the seller's account they are converted into dollars.
When listing an item in pounds on eBay.co.uk the following message appears to the seller:
"Since your item is listed in a currency different from the one you will be billed in, your item's fees (insertion and
final value) will be calculated using the auction currency. All fees will then be converted to your billing currency
using our daily exchange rate."
LostWitness 16.03.2001 11:43
I rated this Helpful because one of the things you said was incorrect. You said "Remember that if you do list in pounds on eBay.co.uk the listing and final valuation
fees etc. will be calculated and charged to your account in dollars." This isn't true - items listed on ebay.co.uk are charged in ounds - items listed
on ebay.com are converted to dollars.
Mar 16th, 2001
very helpful by (57%):
helpful by (43%):
