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eBay Article for 50 Plus Lifestyle Magazine
Doing Business Safely on eBay
eBay has opened up great potential marketing venues for both buyers and sellers all over the world. Just today, the proprietor of an art shop in Madison exclaimed to me how segments of her business really took off with the advent of eBay. I personally have been able to sell and buy with ease rare or unusual items I never would have otherwise expected to see marketed anywhere. eBay provides not only the marketplace to advertise or find anything you can imagine, it also provides simple tools for managing transactions and mechanisms for helping buyers and sellers avoid doing business with potentially shady characters.
eBay Basics
To see how eBay works, simply go to eBay.com and click on the “buy” button on the top of the page. Another page will open showing the basic categories with a little search function set on top. You can start clicking down through the categories and sub-categories of interest to you, or you can just type a descriptive term or phrase in the search field and click on the “search” button. Try to be as specific as you can with search terms. For example, if you search using the term “antique dolls”, you’ll get a listing of a couple thousand items; but if you type “antique ceramic dolls” for a search term, you’ll get back a much smaller list of items.
eBay has some powerful search tools. Notice how, off to the left, the item listing of any search also shows the categories and sub-categories under which the search term was found. You can click on any of those to filter the results down to include only those items that fit into those categories. For tougher searches, you can also put a check mark in “search title and description” to have the search tool look beyond just the title of listings for your term. You can even click to put a check mark in “completed listings” to see what items actually sold for when the auction ended.
Click on each individual item listed to see all the details about it: who is selling it, what they are claiming about it, what kinds of payment they will accept, how much they will charge for shipping, whether they will provide a warranty, and the seller’s feedback rating and score. They will likely even include pictures of the item to help you see exactly what you are getting.
Feedback: Knowing Who to Trust
One of the most important aspects of buying or selling on eBay is feedback, which you can see in the box on the right side of any item listing titled “Seller Information”. If you are a purchaser, you need to be wary of sellers with a low positive feedback percentage and/or a small number of feedback scores. A low positive feedback is anything less than 100%, especially if the number of feedback scores is low. When sellers handle hundreds or thousands of eBay transactions, sooner or later something is going to go wrong and they will get a percentage less than 100%. So if, for example, a seller has a positive feedback of 99.8% based on 300 feedback scores, they are probably worth trusting.
To find more detail about the seller’s feedback history, click on the number in the parenthesis next to the seller’s user ID. This will show you a list of the feedback and comments received from all past transactions beginning with the most recent. You can tell from here the dates of the transactions, whether they were the buyer or seller, and the user ID of the person on the other end of the transaction. You can even click on the item number to see what exactly was bought or sold.
A low number of feedback scores may simply reflect the seller’s relative lack of eBay experience, but it could also be the sign of an untrustworthy seller who recently set up a new account to get past a bad rating. If the seller has only a few feedback scores, you may want to skip doing business with them, even if their positive feedback is 100%.
To help decide, carefully examine the feedback history. Check to see how far back that history goes, what types of transactions were involved (buying or selling), if there are any patterns to the ID’s of the other buyers or sellers, and what kinds of items were bought or sold. If the transactions were a mix of buying and selling, spread over a longer period of time (not just recent), involving a variety of items, all to different buyers and sellers, a low number of feedback scores is probably reflective of a casual eBayer who does not use it very often. In that circumstance, you can probably trust that the positive feedback accurately reflects that user’s eBay track record.
Setting up eBay and PayPal Accounts
Searching on eBay is a relatively simple and safe matter. Knowing how to handle transactions is another story. To more easily manage eBay transactions, setting up both an eBay and a PayPal account is crucial. An eBay account is necessary, especially if you want to get into selling, but it also makes things easier even if you are only buying. PayPal is a secure on-line money transfer system that was design specifically to handle eBay transactions, allowing buyers and sellers to send and receive money over the internet without worry. Many eBay sellers in fact will insist on accepting only PayPal as the method of payment because it has so many built in safeguards. Yes, both services charge a nominal fee, but the process ease and peace of mind is worth it.
Before starting an eBay and PayPal account, I recommend setting up a new separate email address to use with these accounts. This would allow you to keep your regular email address secure and free of additional unwanted spam (email solicitations). Use something cryptic for the email address itself so that it would be impossible for someone else to figure out your identity. To really keep financials secure, consider setting up a second checking account for doing business through eBay that is not linked to any of your other accounts. Finally, a robust internet security system is always recommended, but is no doubt more important when doing business over the internet.
Setting up the eBay and PayPal accounts is relatively easy. You need to give them some basic personal information, choose a user ID and password, and then link the accounts to a financial account, like the special checking account you set up for the purpose. You can feel pretty confident submitting this information over the internet, especially if your computer has appropriate levels of security protection, because both websites use secure encryption servers for the purpose. Again, you’d be well advised picking user ID’s and passwords that are cryptic and would not allow anyone else to figure out your real identity.
Once you have these accounts all set up, you are ready to eBay with confidence. You can read about how to get started using both eBay and PayPal by clicking on “Help” in their respective web pages. One final note of caution: After you start using your eBay and PayPal accounts, you can expect to get email messages that look to be official notices from eBay or PayPal about your accounts, but are really “phishing” scams trying to get you to give away secure information. Just delete these messages and never click on any links within them. If you have questions or concerns about your eBay or PayPal accounts, just log into them on the internet, and if necessary, contact their customer support departments.
Happy Bidding!