Ebay’s had its fair share of free publicity. From the first time that someone tried to sell a live baby on there to the latest yet equally entrepreneurial/sick ‘World Trade Centre, piece of," auction. So having found a number of old Ericsson mobile accessories such as chargers, hands free kits and desktop chargers and having no one to buy them Ebay seemed was an obvious option to raise some much needed beer money.

I guess I had nothing to lose but the rules of auctions mean that you can’t list everything you have over all the sites without cheesing off buyers. To build a good reputation, which is something that debatably helps you, you have to stick with just one site and set of bidders. No doubt though buyers are surfing through all the sites anyway so this shouldn’t really matter.

Like any tight Internet user I want to know if it’s free or not and I’ll tell you now, it isn’t. On top of that there’s an air of scamming about the place. In their introduction, of which I read every presented section, they seemed to mention absolutely everything I needed to know except the fact that I was going to be charged a minimum listing fee of 30p purely for having my item displayed whether it sold or not. One is warned about the listing fee just before the item is listed and this I had no trouble with this as it is an acceptable price (30p for items up to £14.99, then 60p for items £15 or above and so on). Basically to get the best deal list items for £10 and hope they reach an acceptable price.

In total it works out as roughly 8% of the total I made from selling my items. I’d find 2% reasonable. I understand Ebay have to make their money somehow but I still find no clear explanation of these charges in any of the help section.

Still on usability, listing the item was not as easy as just filling in any old form. There are a lot of rules and regulations that limit you from using certain functions as a first time user. These include setting a price people can automatically win the auction at and setting a ‘reserve price’ which means that you do not have to sell your item if it does not reach a set price. I found it more than mildly annoying having to go back and fill in the form again each time I selected one of these options. Once I did a couple though I was fine with it. Along with the inability to set a reserve price I found was that first time users were unable to use the PayPal function (where people can pay you via credit card).

The buyers were a cautious bunch who obviously didn’t want to get their fingers burnt and really wanted reassuring that the merchandise was genuine Ericsson kit and not Asian imitation fake. All done via some courteous emails.