Ebay the online market
 Aug 27th, 2002 (Sep 23rd, 2002)
Advantages:
You don't need to pay a fortune for Design stuff !
Disadvantages:
Sometimes second hand stuff is not perfect as you wished !
Recommendable:
Yes
Detailed rating:
Layout & Design
Navigation
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Quality of the Content
Range of Services / Products
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About me:
Hello! My name is Andrea and I come from Brazil, I try to do my best writing my opinions, because En...
Member since:18.09.2000
Reviews:140
Members who trust:17
Review rated by 30 Ciao members on average: very helpful 
This review received a counterstatement by a party concerned
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Home…the very first page! For those are not so sure of what is the Ebay online market and would like just to have a look go for it, feel free to browse around. For those that show interest in trading whatever springs to mind, selling or buying, than you’ve got to register. I am not here to describe the Ebay home page from the Design aspect of view, if the page works well, if it is fast or not, but I am here to talk about the service that in my own opinion does worth to talk about it in a very basic way. The registration process is simple but if you have an anonymous email address as such Hotmail for example you will need your credit card details and the reason for that is that all Ebay users are verified, and you cannot be verified using a anonymous account, but if you have an internet provider email address
as such AOL for example than you will be verified automatically not needing your credit card details. Buyers please note that it doesn’t mean that when paying for an item your credit card will be discounted just because when you’ve registered you gave your credit card details…in most of the cases you will have other choices of payment as such Postal Order, Pay-Pal, etc. To became a seller you DO need your credit card details no matter what and plus some. What do I mean by that? As a seller you need to be able to give to the buyers choices of payment and not only for that, but also someone from other countries might be interested in purchase your item, remember this is an online worldwide market 24/7, and it is not for the UK only. Pay-pal let’s you transfer money at any time all over the world and for auctions payments there is no fee for the buyers. I do recommend for buyers and sellers, but all the transactions are made in American Dollars therefore you need a currency converter that you can find on the bottom of the Ebay site.
What are you looking for? Well the Searching tab is there for you to maybe find exactly what you have in mind or something similar or maybe any other items that you didn’t even think about it at the time, who knows? You decide! But also you have the Categories…Antiques&Art, Computers&Gaming, etc… If you’re looking to buy a Persian rug for an example you also can click on the categories Antiques&Art. If you click on All Categories you will see the subtitles what I do prefer. Following the example I just mentioned above, let’s say I am searching for a Persian rug to buy, and found what I wanted. Here is when the bidding starts, and believe me sometimes you come across with some tension, it is competition time. Bidding? It is a learning process. You click on the item’s page and voila all the description is there, how you can pay, p&p, but before you bid you should be cautious and check the sellers profile to see if he/she has a negative feedback for some reason. Everything you do is at your own risk, so why not to make sure you’re doing the right thing? When you place a bid you are under a contract, this is very serious and protects buyers or sellers from time wasters. If the seller is ok, and you’re happy to continue, you can place the minimum bid that is shown on the page or you can place a proxy bidding which means that is the maximum amount you are ok to pay. If the minimum bid is £2,50 and you place your bid of £4,00 you will be the current higher bidder until someone bid against you what sometimes it happens and sometimes you’re the real lucky winner, but if happens and this someone bid £3,00 Ebay automatically will increase your bid saying to the other person that is bidding that the minimum bid is £3,50 and even if you’re not online Ebay will take care of it for you, but if the other person increase to £5,00 you are out of bid because your maximum bid was £4,00 and you should place a higher bid and so on and so forth. Some items are classified RESERVE, what means that the seller has a minimum price that item should be sold and if the reserve price is not met the seller is not obligated to sell the item . Some items and most of them are NO RESERVE and the start price is low, as such 0,01p this is because the higher the seller place the item’s price the higher is the Ebay charge (note Ebay charges the sellers when the item is sold, I am not sure how it works because I am not a seller yet), but there are some sellers that found the way around it, and pass the buck to the buyers charging the p&p of the item very high. So check always the p&p price. Obviously for heavy item the p&p has to be high as for example furniture. I think you’ve got the idea!
Check out! You’re the winning bidder and you have to complete the form after winning that Ebay will ask you to complete with your delivery address and method of payment. Wait for the item arrives and check it out. The other day I bet on an item making sure that the seller was from the UK. It was written Location: London- Country: UK, so I was ok with that, until I got the winning bidder confirmation. The check out form was for the USA address and that’s how I came across Pay-Pal to be able to pay for the item, but I wasn’t that happy!!!
23/09/2002_________________________________
News: The person mentioned above has changed the Country from UK to USA, I bet someone complained about it!
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13.09.2002 15:39
Some really useful information in there. Did you ever find out how they could put a UK address and then when you bought the item find it was the USA. If you do find out it might be a good idea to add it to your opinion so that we can be aware of this if we decide to use this service. Thanks Peter
01.09.2002 12:49
A site so far I have managed to avoid I did have a look when I was searching for a laptop, but eventually bought from a main high street retailer. Sue
28.08.2002 17:28
I use ebay too mainly for buying rather than selling, though I have sold a few items on there.