Best Buy often doesn’t give you the best buys, but eBay might. But eBay can be dangerous if you don’t know your way around. Here’s a quick guide to what to expect including 5 tips on how to buy on eBay and 5 tips on how to sell. EBay is an online auction service open to everybody. That means many legitimate sellers and buyers and a handful of scammers. These tips will help you avoid the scammers and get good prices on both the buying side and selling side.

Buying tips

1. Read the listing very carefully – don’t be afraid to ask the seller questions. This is especially important for something like a laptop (see our Laptop Buying Guide).
2. Any listing that tells you to directly e-mail questions to a seller’s e-mail address, or tell you to offer a buying price directly to the seller is a scam – plain and simple. EBay provides a secure system for seller/buyer interactions and it works fine.
3. Beware of buying from someone with 0 or negative feedback – read some of the feedback comments and ratings. I’ve been burned before buying from someone with 0 feedbacks and do not ever do it anymore.
4. 90% positive feedback is NOT good by eBay standards. Typically, for large volume sellers (ones with a lot of ratings), 95% or 97% and up is pretty good. Many of them have over 99% positive feedback. See this article for more in-depth info (link).
5. Use an auction sniper. Do not bid on an item a long time before the auction ends. There’s no reason to bid except in the few seconds right before an auction ends if you want the best price. Here’s an explanation of this principle, validated by research. There are online software applications that do this for you automatically – just enter in the item # (copy and paste from eBay listing page) and max price you would bid. Some of these services charge a fee, but Gixen is free (I use it) and doesn’t require any kind of registration.

Selling tips

1. List your item accurately and make your shipping/returns terms explicitly clear – this will help you avoid potential hassles later on.
2. Make it clear that you ship ONLY to the United States, NO exceptions. This will help you avoid most scammers (who will ask you to ship to Nigeria or UK or somewhere else).
3. Accept PayPal, and I suggest, only PayPal, to protect against buyer fraud. Other payment methods lack the security that PayPal transfers give you.
4. Be strategic in listing your item, so that the auction ends on a Saturday or Sunday evening. Typically more people bid on weekends and ending the auction at that time has a better chance to land you a higher selling price.
5. Ship promptly and communicate with your buyer – getting a higher feedback score will give future buyers more confidence to bid on your items, and thus will get you higher sales prices (generally more buyers bidding drives up the sales price).

Why eBay?
From an economic perspective, eBay is a market with imperfect information and imperfect competition. In other words, if you’re patient and know some of the tricks of the trade, you can get really good deals. Here are a few examples of good deals I found on eBay just by following the tips I provided above, both on the buying and selling side. I bought a Lenovo ThinkPad x60 off eBay, at a price $800 less than it would have costed on lenovo.com, used it for 3 months, and sold it on eBay for $75 more than I paid for it. I bought a music CD brand new off eBay for $3.36 that costs $13.99 from Amazon. I also bought the current laptop I own, a Lenovo ThinkPad T60, for $780 shipped from eBay, warranty included, that retailed for $1470 from Newegg at the time I bought it.

Many electronics and other goods can be bought from eBay cheaper than most retail stores. You can also get a better selling price on eBay on many items than through other means (like campus classifieds). It doesn’t take a genius to use eBay to your benefit - I use it on average only once every month or two - just apply the above tips and use your street smarts and common sense.

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