What's up with all the scams on ebay?

[superboyac]

There are so many freakin scams on ebay!  Go look for laptops and you'll find a ton of sellers with what looks like bargain prices...and then you see their feedback is very good also.  But click on some of the feedback auctions to see what they've sold in the past.  They're all stupid little things like socks, dolls, baby clothes, all for less than $10.  What a scam!  So these people are going from selling hand me down clothes to top of the line laptops?!

[mouser]

ebay used to be really amazing when it was mostly real people selling to real people, now there are so many scammy businesses trying to sell their normal overpriced stuff on it that it's hard to find the real stuff

[superboyac]

No kidding.  You have to be really careful buying anything on ebay now.  There are so many little tricks now, even if they aren't scams.  For example, the way people abuse the shipping and handling fees on it, what are they thinking?  Like if you buy a cd and they charge $4-5 for shipping, which is ridiculous.  I emailed one person who had a cd price STARTING at $8 with a $5 shipping charge.  I'm like, why would I buy this from you when I can go right down to the store and get it for the same price or maybe a dollar more?

Or recently (even though it was a good deal) I bought a cable that normally sells for $50 for $15 from ebay, but the auction price was $1 and shipping was $14 for tiny little cable.  What are they trying to pull off here?  Just be honest, say the cable costs $13 and charge a couple of bucks for shipping.  My goodness.

[mouser]

yes, shipping scams are proliferating there.

if you follow my golden rule for ebay you will have a good experience:  do not buy from companies on ebay.

if you see an item, the frist thing to figure out is, is it being sold by a real person selling a few things, or someone running a business on ebay or using ebay as a portal for their business.  if you restrict yourself to stuff sold by real people not businesses you will do fine.

[superboyac]

ah!  OK, I'll remember that.  So, is it always obvious if they're a company?  I think it's pretty easy to tell, right?

Also, while I'm ranting, what's with the people who put really fuzzy or bad pictures of their item on ebay?  Why can't they just put a good, clear picture?  sheesh.

[mouser]

you can click any listing to show other listings by same person;
so if you have doubt, just do that and it will give you a pretty good clue (ie they are selling 100 of them).