On an earlier thread somewhere a member related how he got burned buying a MB on eBay and was having a tough time getting ahold of the seller. Like, it couldn't be done. It was interesting because i had spent a lot of time on eBay the previous week looking for a camera lens and trying to decide which of the many dealers to patronize. Tonight, in my in-box, there was an advertisement about becoming a professional eBay-er Retailer and making a bundle. After my laughter subsided, i thought why not take a look to see what the pitch was. OK, so here is this outfit selling you a stack of books and references ten feet high for 'only 24.95', 'but wait, there's more'... you also get the long list of importers and suppliers around the world, like 30,000 of them, where you can order great stuff for next to nothing and keep the difference. On one example they had one of the new Jeep <sup>&#169;</sup> bicycles, retail 260 (Jeep sells them for 250) you buy it for 24.95 (or some-such) and resell it for whatever the traffic will bear. OK, so now we're getting to the last page of this business plan: We hang our shingle out at eBay, advertise all this good stuff for sale at bargain prices, and when the buyer sends us the money we hurry and order it from one of the 30,000 suppliers and send it to the customer. That may be a bit simplistic, but fairly close to the bottom-line.
Now i understand a little better why eBay tries so hard to provide feedback and customer comments about the sellers (and buyers) on their site. There were a lot of "individuals" selling stuff, some of them you could identify as probably selling their old toys to make room for their new toys, but some of them kind of looked like one-room operations. Others had 1-800 tele-numbers and a real carbon-based lifeform actually answered the phone and had the information you asked for. Another answered their email within a few hours overnight and within an hour during the daytime. Many also had brick and mortar storefronts.
I hope our AO'er gets his bad motherboard purchase sorted out and either gets a good one or his money back. We should all probably be a bit more careful of purchases where we don't really know anything about the seller except what his advertisement says. Especially when this outfit i visited tonight is recruiting people off the street to start up their very own reseller business using eBay visitors as their vehicle for success.
"Buyer Beware" ?