eBay Review

Ebay is my favorite online shopping site.  It is easy to use, especially the auctions that take Paypal, so that you can just pay online quickly and securely and don't have to give your personal info like a credit card number or checking account number to sellers. It's easy to shop whether you're looking for something specific, or just browsing. 

The selection can't be beat.  Pretty much anything you can think of, and tons of stuff you never knew existed, can be found on ebay.  The mindboggling selection of new and used and collectible items is just amazing.  It's like a gigantic department store, specialty store, antique store, and yard sale all rolled into one huge store.  The giant selection of items available from worldwide is especially great for people that live in rural areas where there's not a whole lot of options for shopping for some things locally, especially for niche items. Also it's great for people that keep funny hours and like to shop at times when not many stores are still open.  Ebay makes practically every product you can envision available 24 hours a day. 

While paypal does offer some added security (Sellers don't see your payment information and there is a dispute resolution system where you can get a refund if you get ripped off.), ebay still requires a little bit of cautious shopping.  Often even though you can get your money back, either from the seller or from Paypal, it's such a hassle to go through the dispute process or expense to ship an item you're unhappy with back, it's just not worth it to fight it.  You end up just getting stuck.  I bought something that wasn't what I'd hoped once, and ended up just out the money I'd spent on it (luckily only 10 bucks).  But that was only once out of the hundreds of things I've bought on ebay.  You learn to look at the feedback, if a seller is highly rated, they are more likely to be a good seller, and if they are rated poorly, they are likely to be a bad seller.  Feedback isn't fool proof.  Good sellers can get some bad feedback from bad bidders.  Bad sellers can artificially inflate their feedback (selling lots of 1 penny ebooks and giving and getting good feedback is a popular way of distorting feedback).  But overall, feed back is a pretty good guide for who to trust and who to worry about.  And as always, you'll want to bear in mind if a deal is too good to be true, it probably isn't.   Like that Gibson Les Paul guitar that normally sells for over 4000 dollars that you see a listing for for 35 dollars may seem exciting, but upon closer inspection, you'll look and notice it's coming from China,is probably a counterfeit  knock off, and has a hidden 300 dollar shipping charge.  Using a little common sense, reading feedback scores and comments, and reading every item's entire listing carefully will prevent most of the troubles you could run into.  Most ebay sellers are honest and just want to make money and make their customers happy. 

Also, ebay participates in igive.com and goodsearch.com's charity shopping programs.  So if you search through igive or goodsearch (and you should,they don't cost you a dime, and are hassle free), ebay donates a percentage of the listing fees they collect to the charity of your choice.  So you can treat yourself on ebay without any pesky buyers guilt.