Quick Tips for Buying Consumer Electronics on eBay (cont'd)

Deciding where to place your bid

Once you have a list of five to ten items that meet your requirements and price range, you’ll need to actually decide where to place your bid. More often than not, this comes down to balancing your need to get the best price against your equally important need to buy from a reputable, conscientious seller. Here’s how to choose.

• Don’t just take the lowest priced item first. This is a common mistake made by eBay beginners, and one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Read each of the item listings in question carefully to extract as much information from them as you can. Give more weight to sellers who describe the item’s condition in detail (“new in box,” or “used but functional with some scratches”) than to sellers who don’t say anything at all about its condition. Read warranty, return, and shipping policies carefully to see how complicated things will be in each case if you receive a defective or unsatisfactory item.
  
  
• Check the seller’s feedback. Checking the feedback of each of the sellers in question is perhaps the most important step in deciding which auction to bid on or which item to purchase. As a general rule, never buy from any electronics seller whose feedback isn’t above 97 percent, and give strong preference to sellers over 99 percent. Actually read the feedback comments from other buyers and watch for complains related to shipping practices, item quality, or anything else that raises a red flag. Consumer electronics items are high-value items; it pays to be extra-careful with your seller selection since any loss may be large.
  
  
• Don’t bid on auctions with obvious warning signs. Check each listing carefully for anything that indicates that there may be something wrong with the listing or seller or that indicates that the listing in question may be fraudulent. Keep in mind the old adage that “if it seems to good to be true, it probably is,” and avoid buying anything expensive from a seller that is outside your home country. Even if you receive a working item under such circumstances, most consumer electronics manufacturers will refuse to honor any manufacturer’s warranty for items bought outside the market to which they were originally exported.
  
  
• Buy from credit card-friendly sellers and be careful about shipping. Because of the high value and typical fragility of consumer electronics items, it’s the process of completing the transaction is more risky and more complication-prone than it is for many other types of items commonly bought and sold on eBay. Avoid sellers who don’t either accept PayPal or give you some other method by which to pay with a credit card, since credit card purchases are typically protected by the card issuer. Be sure that your seller is willing to pack the item well and that he or she offers a delivery method and tracking that you can easily work with—it wouldn’t do to have your new $3,500 consumer electronics item delivered to your doorstep and left to sit there outdoors until you arrive home from work seven hours later!

If after following all of these tips you still have trouble with your purchase, don’t wait to resolve the issue. Contact your trading partner, eBay, your credit card issuer, and the shipper in question if the item arrives damaged, fails to arrive when expected, or arrives in a condition other than the one expected. eBay, credit card issuers, and shippers all impose limits on the amount of time that you have to lodge any complaint that you may have, so your ability to seek recourse in the event of any problems is limited to a short period of time following the sale.