There are three things to always check on before buying or bidding on an eBay item, the first is the sellers location.
As you use ebay, you will see that some of the sellers live in Canada, or even the U.K. If you are like me and live here in the U.S. you may wish to just buy or bid on items that are here in the same country, to avoid a long delivery time, and large shipping fees.
Each ebay item description page, tells the users address, for instance it will say ‘ Item location: Chatsworth, CA United States ‘, etc, near the top and middle area of the screen. Another thing to check is what the shipping costs will be. Some folks offer very high shipping, for instance someone may sell a shirt for only $2.00 but have a set shipping fee of $15, so always search the item description page before bidding and buying to find the shipping information.
Some item description pages have a box, with a button on them called ‘ Calculate ‘, once you click on this button, just enter your zip code, and it will tell you what the exact shipping fees will be.
One more thing to always check on is what methods the seller accepts as payment. Some folks only accept PayPal, others only accept Money Orders, or Checks, while some accept all methods. Look for this information on the item description screens also, it’s listed usually under the item’s description section, in an area called: ‘ Payment methods accepted ‘, all three of these things I have told you about, are easy to find and view on any item’s description screen.
As you search and look at different items listed on eBay, you will see that a lot of people only accept PayPal as their form of payment. If you are not familiar with ‘ PayPal ‘ visit, paypal.com. Signing up and joining PayPal is simple and free, and it has great benefits especially for using eBay. PayPal payments are secure, and the money is sent instantly to the seller, it makes eBay a lot more fun to use, when buying items on eBay I use both PayPal payments and money orders.
Now let me just explain a little about ‘ feedback ‘ and how it’s very important when it comes to buying and selling on ebay.
Let’s go back to the ebay webpage that shows the listings for the ‘ singing fish ‘. As I pick a listing at random, I look under the ‘ Seller Information ‘ area of that page, I see the sellers eBay name, and the Feedback Score.
The feedback score tells you how many buy/sell transactions a user has made in the past on eBay, and the percentage of the transactions that were positive. This info is a great way to protect yourself from a seller or buyer that may not be very reputable. For example if you were interested in bidding or buying an item, and you noticed the person listing the item had a feedback number of 6 and a positive percentage of 20%, stay away from this person, but if the person had a feedback number of 6 and a positive percentage of 99% or so, they would be a lot safer to deal with.
Now before finishing this article I want to give you two more pointers or bits of information to use to make your eBay experiences good ones.
Once you become familiar and can find your way around the different areas, go to your account screen, and find the option to change your password. My eBay password is over 14 characters long and contains letters and numbers in random order. I change my password every month or two, and I recommend you do this also.
The main reason I recommend you change your eBay password every month or two, is because there are a lot of nasty computer viruses and trojan horses floating around on the internet and arriving through email, and the purpose of some of these viruses is to scan your hard drive and seek out your passwords, ebay’s included, and to email this info to hackers and other websites, giving folks you don’t know access to your eBay account information.
In all of my years using eBay, I have never had one problem, and you should not either if you read and follow my advice and tips in this article, and just use some common sense or internet savy. There is no way I or anyone can guarantee you will never have trouble using ebay or any internet site, but neither can someone guarantee you won’t become involved in a wreck while driving a vehicle.
There is a great FREE eBook that describes in detail how to ‘ How To Join eBay and PayPal – and Safely Use Each ‘, The eBook contains NO AdWare or SpyWare and is available for immediate download from this website address:
http://www.rb59.com/jepasut
By Robert W. Benjamin
Copyright ? 2006
You may publish this article in your ezine, newsletter or on your web site as long as it is reprinted in its entirety and without modification except for formatting needs or grammar corrections.
Robert W. Benjamin has been in the software business on the internet for over 5 years, and has been producing low-cost software for the past 25+ years. He first released software on the AMIGA and C64 computer systems in the late 1970′s-80′s.
RB59 Software
