I’ve spent altogether too long and too much money on Ebay in the past, but it’s great fun, and to be fair I have also made a lot of money from selling my stuff on the site. You may have read some horror stories about eBay auctions in the past, but to be honest it’s easy to avoid the pitfalls as long as you’re sensible and have access to good advice.
The first thing you need to know is how to secure your eBay account and this link will give you some great advice on how to choose passwords, ensure you don’t get taken to fake sites, and just generally look after yourself. When you’re securely setup, start learning how to bid clever, with these Top 10 tips for buying on eBay, which tell you how to avoid the scams, find the bargains, check out your seller, and how to promote yourself if you plan to move into selling. I can tell you from personal experience what a buzz it is to find an item you’ve been looking for for ages, at half price because the seller spelt their listing incorrectly!
As you move into experienced territory, you’ll want more, and you can really make use of these smart Ebay Auction Tools to time your bids to the last second, and stay ahead of the game-never lose an auction again to a price lower than you were willing to pay!
Ebay is a cool site, and you can really find just about anything you’re looking for on there - I quite fancy these cycling lights on eBay for my new bike 
and I know all the tricks to get them for the right price now. There’s nothing ‘dodgy’ about them, it’s simply gaining a good understanding of how the site works, and how you can make it work for you.
This post is Sponsored by BamAuction.com
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I’m horrified by the number of people buying large ticket items on eBay, and Wiring large sums of money to strangers or phoney escrow companies.
People need to know how to protect themselves since PayPal is fine if you are trading cheap stuff. But for big ticket items, it’s ridiculous. You can’t pay for an expensive car — or piece of earthmoving equipment — or a boat for $500.
If eBay adds trade finance as a payment option, then a buyer can open a domestic Documentary Letter of Credit with their bank using standard criteria which eBay could post on their payment page. The seller is paid when the “pink slip” is presented to the buyer’s bank. No documentation and delivery, no money.
There are a couple of great benefits to this: the banks have been handling escrow accounts and Letter of Credit for over one hundred years, and know how to do it ethically. Domestic LCs are not much different from international LCs, so eBay simultaneously opens up the rest of the world to responsibly bid on big ticket items. Everyone makes more money.
If the seller wants to be paid immediately, they can use a company like InterNetLC.com which has a network of social investors who will advance the money, put an Assignment of Proceeds onto the LC for the amount of the loan plus their mark-up, InterNetLC.com does all the paperwork involved and inspects the item to ensure that it is shipped for a minimal fee, and when the “pink slip” and documents clear the buyer’s bank, the social investors are repaid.
InterNetLC.com has been contacting eBay about this programming addition for about three years. We’ve had two appointments, but were met by staffers who knew nothing about banking and everything about IT. Both youngsters politely said that eBay is making so much money selling $10 T-shirts that no-one was interested in solving the problem of large ticket sales or supplementing PayPal’s services. And we were politely shown the door.
This is a simple answer, and it wouldn’t cost eBay anything beyond the programming.
InterNetLC.com has already helped other on-line auctions, and successfully shipped $200,000-heavy equipment to Ethiopia and Nigeria using this method. Everyone got paid.
John Dunlop, CEO of InterNetLC.com, is making presentations to international bankers on the inevitable addition of international trade finance to on-line auctions, because the flood of business will be enormous for them. It will open up exporting to the masses, and seriously crimp the fraudsters profits.