It’s no secret that I buy and sell stuff on eBay… who doesn’t at least buy stuff from eBay?
There’s a product that I’ve kind of been wanting, but I don’t want to pay full price plus tax for it since I know it’s not worth the full price.
I found it for $19.99 shipped on eBay. Regular price is $29.99-$34.99 plus tax, depending on where you buy it, and possibly plus shipping too. So $19.99 is a good enough deal for me, especially since buying a replacement part of that product from Nintendo’s online store will cost about the same… with eBay, I’ll be getting the whole product. But sometimes I worry about buying stuff on eBay, like how could a seller offer this product that normally sells for $29.99+ for just $14.00 plus $5.99 shipping? Sure, it’s listed as used in “like new” condition, but is that really what I’ll be getting? Even though the seller has really good feedback, I still wonder about these things.
So, what do I do? Well, I’ve done this before and people have always been really helpful. You can either look through the seller’s feedback and see if anyone’s bought that same product before (this works better for bulk listings since you’d know that they’ve sold more than one already) and check what kind of feedback people left. That can be helpful, but sometimes people only leave one or two words of feedback like, “Great” or “Thanks” which isn’t useful at all if you’re trying to find out about the item itself.
If I don’t find any helpful feedback, I’ll go ahead and contact the eBay members who have bought the same item from previous auctions. This is perfectly fine and doesn’t go against eBay policies because I’m not trying to sell them anything, just asking them questions. Just tell them you saw that they won ____ product from ____ seller and that you’re thinking of buying the same thing and were curious about the quality of the product (if it was as described) and if you have any specific questions about the item (like if there are multiple versions of a product, which version was it?).
The worst that can happen is people will just ignore you and usually if I ever get a reply, people are extremely helpful. I sent the same eBay message to three people last night asking about the product, and so far I’ve gotten two great responses that have convinced me to buy from the seller. I was already convinced after the first reply, but it’s nice to get a second opinion basically agreeing with the first person’s opinion.
It’s great how nice other people are on the Internet. If you’ve got a question about something, it never hurts to ask.