Ebay has over 120 million registered users and it can be a great place to make extra money by selling what you now longer need or even starting a business. My wife and I used to have 7 employees doing Ebay full time and we were making a net of about $8,000 per week. But what about the buyers? They shop sites like Ebay hoping to find lower prices on items that they are looking at buying any way. A pair of pants that sells at American Eagle for $40 and here it is ion Ebay for only $30. Is this a deal or what? But wait, after you pay the $12 shipping you are actually spending more.
Sites like Ebay are like a drug. People keep bidding on items going higher and higher in price because they will do anything to win. People get in a frenzy and by the time they have won the item they have paid a lot more then they could have gotten that same item for at a local store. Once in awhile this would not be that bad but what about the people that keep on repeating this? The cannot provide the basic necessities for their kids because most of their money is being spent on these online auction sites like Ebay. Yahoo has auction, amazon auctions, Ubid the list just goes on and on.
People need to truly look only for deals. Maybe by looking for items with free shipping. I sold video games that by the time somebody one the item and you add shipping they were still paying less than they would have paid at the local game store. Bargains can be found you just have to look for them. Also look at the sellers user rating and read what past customers have to say about them.
Another area which can be very disastrous is all the scams that are on these online auction sites. I know one gentleman who was selling a car on Ebay. Some Nigerian won the auction and sent the seller a check for the amount of the auction plus a lot of money extra. The Nigerian said the rest was to pay for shipping and if the seller could please wire the balance back by Western Union. The check was counterfeit and by the time the bank realized this it was too late. The seller had already wired several thousand to the buyer via Western Union. He had deposited the check in his account and the bank gave him the funds right away. Now this man is in jail, owes the bank the money for the check, and his car was seized by the FBI because it was used in the act of a crime. This was this mans first time in jail and I think he ended up spending a month there.
Ebay would offer no help because they claim it is a liability issue. There are so many buyers and sellers out there and they all are potential victims. You would think that sites like Ebay, amazon,Yahoo, and the others would issue a warning to their buyers and sellers but they don't. My wife and I once got paid for some computers with stolen checks. We did everything that a responsible merchant would do like calling the bank they were drawn from and doing everything that we knew to do. I had to spend almost a month in jail for this and jail is no place I wish to have to go back to. We lost 3 years of our lives because of this plus we lost out business. This is happening to millions of people worldwide.
It should be a law that if you have a site like Ebay that you need to protect your buyers and sellers but unfortunately it is not. There are no second chances with an online auction site like Ebay. With sites like Ebay you need to be careful if you are just a buyer.
