At one time I was an Ebayaholic, both on the buying and selling end. Made and spent a whole lot of money there. Now I rarely go on, even to look at stuff. For me what did it in was the fee increases and the stipulation you must use their Paypal to pay for items, or to be paid. Greed, greed, greed.
The one advantage to Ebay is that you can find hard to find items that you otherwise would never see anywhere else. I play with traditional (sort of) hot rods, and some of those old parts are not even showing up at swap meets any more. I have used Craigslist, but my local one rarely has parts or cars that are of interest to me. I just did sell my one daily driver 84 Ford that I no longer used on Craigslist, but I had to put up with stuff like "Do you have a carfax on it?," or, I don't have the money today, would you take payments?"
I just bought something on Ebay a month ago because I couldn't find it anywhere else, so I guess I will continue going there when I need to. But I used to be poring over ads every night for hours in the past. I must say, out of the maybe one thousand transactions I must have done on Ebay, I only got stung twice.
Finally, I did see one guy get all his money back on a bad deal. Young guy bought a used boat on Ebay and it broke down on the way home. Ad said everything was rebuilt. He was towed into our marina and we determined it had not been rebuilt. I wrote the guy a letter to that effect, he presented it to Ebay, and they sent him all his money back and told him to scrap the boat. That was a real shocker to me.
Don
