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There are two very different sides to Ebay, the biggest online marketplace or auction site. One side is wonderful, convienant, can be pretty exciting, and will provide you with a pleasant shopping experience. The other, well, it is basically just full of a lot of dirty, lying, thieving scammers that try to reel you in with all sorts of shams. Treachery at its finest. They range from lowly twister of words, all the way up to insidious hacking machine out to take whatever they can get their hands on. Scary huh? When I first started out buying stuff on Ebay, I really wish that I knew then what I know now. Maybe some sort of beginners guide or a knowledge test that I needed to pass in order to safely buy/sell and protect myself from unforeseen foes. Those worthless help pages are just that. Worthless. It does sound a little extreme, but then again I'd much rather have had to take an extensive test than have to learn the sometimes malicious ropes in a huge world that I knew nothing about. Think about it, you just discover Ebay, you are looking for a cell phone. "Wow, lots of choices. Oh cool, $5.00 bucks! Look at all the stuff it comes with!" You bid with a fury and win it, instantly paying with your credit card or money order. Now, a few things can happen: you actually get your seemingly steal of a deal, you recieve it but its crap and/or broken(should've read those little words that said refurbished or sold for parts!), you communicate for weeks with someone from Nigeria who doesn't even talk english, or nothing happens, your money is just simply gone and you have nothing to show for it. I think that it should be beaten into new buyers, or maybe only buyers of electronics, that if it looks too good to be true and has chinese characters all over it, you need to RUN!

When I first stumbled across this site, I was very intrigued to say the least. I mean, how cool is bidding on auctions right from your computer? I quickly read up on it, scanned all the help pages, and tried to read between the lines because there was just simply too much to take in all at once. Right away though, I noticed some things that were a little funky. Things like cds and dvds shipping for $9.99, items sold for $0.01 but shipping was $50.00, loads and loads of disclaimers, red text at the way bottom of the page that let you know that what you were bidding on wasn't actually the item itself, but in fact a list that would set you on your way of obtaining that item! Why would they go out of their way to hide the truth of their auction from you if what they are selling and doing is not deceitful? Those little disclaimers are such a joke written only to cover their legal arses. The stuff that these people will try to come up with to wrangle you into buying their auction and paying for nothing really is unbelievable as well as unethical. And thats not even scratching the surface of the seedy side of Ebay.

Well, I have a lot of history with this site and have experienced both the good and the bad. I will try to cover both sides of this monster and try to help you decide if you would like to shop here or maybe tip you off about a few things to watch for.

I have a rule for myself about shopping on Ebay. Do not buy anything from anyone with under 5 feedbacks and anyone with feedback numbering in the 1000's. Now, if you don't know what feedback is, I would think that it is pretty self explanatory, but here it is. It is a system designed to give buyers and sellers some background on the person they are dealing with. You can choose either positive for a good experience or negative for an unpleasant one, and you can write a little sentence about it if you choose. In the past, I have found that if someone has 1000+, they are going to be very difficult contacting, will lose a lot of items, as well as give extremely slow shipping, and they just generally aren't someone you would like to buy from again. I look for those modest numbers, hardly ever had a problem with them. If you haven't been on Ebay's site in a while, then you wouldn't know that they have expanded thier feedback system. There are now categories within the feedback that are rated with stars. Shipping, accurate description etc. It is pretty useful, I like that new addition.

The Ebay site itself seems to be changing its interface about every other month. They are always trying new things with their layout, I guess to help with the ease of browsing their site. It gets pretty annoying though, because whenever I get used to their current one, it switches on me in like a week. Overall though, navigation is easy, and you should be able to master it within a good one hour sitting session. The help pages, as I mentioned are just atrocious. Usually you will have a problem that is somewhat unique, and you just aren't going to find what you need in that sea of chaos. I myself, have never managed to get those help pages down. It seems, you open up one, 50 more pop up. I would recommend the live chat. Basically, just go there and whine real good. It should get the job done. Although, if you have a problem that needs solving right away, the wait for the chat rooms can be somewhat maddening.

If you are a seller on Ebay, I would perhaps be a little bit more cautious than buyers would. Definitley describe what you are selling to the best of your ability otherwise you are just asking to open yourself up to disaster. Sometimes thats not enought though. Watch out for the common scam where there are loads of tales of people buying your item, paying for it with the buyers gift to ebay Paypal and then recieving your item. Then, lo and behold what they do is file a claim with paypal that says they never got it. Now they get to keep your merchandise while paypal takes the money from you and gives it back to them! Paypal can be very unjust to sellers. I wouldn't recommend it as a payment method. There are lots of arguments against that though, I know. I just want to err on the side of caution. It hasn't happened to me the few times I've used it. Sometimes though, if I would like to have the money right away, I do accept it and grit my teeth hoping that I am not about to be a lucky recipient of that scam. Which leads me to my own little sordid tale.

It was about the 3rd time I've sold on Ebay. My auction was up and running, I seemed to be getting lots of interest in what I was selling. I was receiving loads of questions and had lots of bids. 24 hours was left in the auction, when it hit. I woke up in the morning and logged on to see what my auction was doing. I tried logging into my ebay account. I couldn't get in. I went to my email. Inside, my inbox I had tons of weird "you just listed" emails, informing me of about 10 items I had just recently listed. Obviously I didn't do that. I logged out of my email and tried again to get on Ebay. No luck. Back to my email I go. Now I couldn't get back onto that either! So, the only thing I could do was get some live chat going. They informed me after asking me if I had listed lots of auctions for things like PS3s and cell phones, that it appeared my account was hjiacked! That was some scary sh!t! My credit card was all over that, all of my email-- infoin there that had basically everything about me in it.

Well, they set it right, only for me to discover that it happened again, like 10 minutes later. This time they had charged my account for over $300! It continued like this, them stealing my account, me regaining control for about 2 hours. I didn't figure out how to stop them from getting control of it again, until I could get into my account and change my email address to a new one. Even when I did this, they still tried to steal it. They had switched all the security questions to new ones, hacked my email forever...it was a very upsetting thing to have happen to me.

I ended up cancelling my credit card just to be safe. I didn't know or want to know, what these apparently seasoned hackers of ebayer accounts were capable of. Needless to say, that incident scared me off of Ebay for awhile. I think what happened was that someone sent me a bogus question, which then prompted me to login to my account to answer it, when actually I was logging onto a site that was depicted to look exactly like Ebay, where they could then steal my password. Such an easy and lethal scam to fall prey to it is not even funny. It has happened to quite a lot of people too. What I recommend against it is to change your password frequently and NEVER log into your account from anywhere other than the actual site. DO NOT go through your email to login!

Lets move on though, because seriously I think I could write about that one particular experience all day long.

Watch out for the fees. Fees for sellers can be quite steep. If you are selling something that will sell for on average in the $5-10 range then it is just not even worth it. You have listing fees(that have fees within fees), final value fees, fees for having pictures, fees for Paypal if you are using it. I mean, what are you going to get for your trouble? $2.00? Too much risk, for way too little reward for me. I would say to stick with selling collectibles or hard to find and high demand items.

There is nothing else really to say about using Ebay. Its a pretty simple concept in itself. Bid on stuff and win it if you are the highest bidder. Navigation is easy, but daunting. Buying is less risky than selling. The customer service is okay...

Maybe I haven't presented such a good argument for why it is a fun place to shop I know, but I'd like this review to be more of a guide to serve a larger purpose; to open the eyes of someone who hasn't shopped there before, and teach them how not too fall victim and learn these things on their own like so many scores of people did. It can be a very satisfying place to shop if you just know some key things about Ebay. Mostly about what to watch out for it. If you are knowledgable and wary while you shop, I assure you, that you will return again and again. Safely.

I now use Ebay mostly exclusively for buying. What other place is there to shop at online as well as in a physical location like Ebay? There are none. Does the good outweigh the bad? It can. If you use it with an educated mind definitley. I like to be able to get what I need for a fraction of the cost and to able to find lots of rare interests of mine. Don't get my cautionary tales wrong, Ebay is a good place to do your shopping and to do it well. Just know a lot about what you are getting yourself into and what you may encounter on your path to buying well.