Which brings me to the next important point: Price isn’t the only thing to consider when buying on eBay.
Know the seller
We don’t just want the lowest prices; we want Best quality item with the lowest price. Unfortunately, I have found that photos are not a good indicator of product quality. I bought many items with terrible photos but turned out to be in great condition, and I bought things with excellent photos that turned out to be junk. (I returned them.)
A much better metric for assessing the quality of an item is the seller’s feedback rating. A good seller—who is more likely to be selling a high-quality item in good condition—will have a feedback rating of 99.8% or higher. I very rarely buy from a seller with a feedback rating of 99.6% or less.
That leaves a gray area — the seller has a 99.7 percent rating. In those cases, click the “detailed feedback” link and read through the recent responses. There can only be one negative review and that was a few months ago. Everyone makes mistakes. Sometimes low ratings come from things that aren’t really the seller’s fault, such as a lost package in the mail, so it pays to read through real reviews and see what’s up. . If the seller has a rating of 99.6 or less, I personally don’t care about the price. I don’t bid.
I bought dozens of laptops, phones, cameras, camera lenses, cast iron cookware, music equipment, and even prepaid cell phone packages from auction sites. In all that time, I only got scammed once, but even then I got my money back. I didn’t get the item I was after, but I didn’t lose anything either.
That said, it’s repeatable: If a deal sounds too good to be true, it is.
How to bid
Once you’ve found an item you want and know how much you want to pay, it’s time to… wait. I strongly recommend only bidding at the last second. And I mean almost literally. I only bid when there are about 5 to 10 seconds left. I wait until the auction is over, then I search for it on my phone, because I think the eBay app has a better interface for the actual bidding (that’s terrible). while browsing) and in those last few seconds I enter my maximum amount. willing to pay.
You don’t bid earlier because you don’t want to give your competitors a chance to react. If you outbid someone days, or even hours, before the auction ends, they will try to outbid you. My guess is that they’ll come back and outbid you, even if you’ve pushed them above their original maximum bid. You don’t want to give others time to experience the emotions of bidding on eBay. Only auctioneers want to hit auctioneers into auction fever. We wish they never saw us coming.
When it drops to about those last 20 seconds, you enter your maximum bid. At that point, a kind of automatic bidding war begins. However, this is not emotional. It is based on machines, rigid logic.
