It seems the number of scams on eBay has came up quite a bit lately. The introduction of high-end, expensive digital SLRs, only made matters worse. Take a look at the digital cameras section. There are always at least 3 or 4, more or less obvious scams with expensive digital equipment. According to fraud.org ( http://www.fraud.org/ ), online auctions were the dominant fraud of 2002. Something tells me things won't get better this year. More than ever we need to take care with who we deal with. More than the number of positive feedbacks, we need to look at the number of negatives and the reasons that led to them. The reasons for negs are recurring in some sellers. I almost got ripped off recently. I overlooked the fact that, even though the seller had a return policy, he hardly ever refunded any one. Actually, after 3 years on eBay and 4 years of online purchase, I got ripped off once at Amazon's used book market and nearly twice on eBay, all this year. Years of successful transactions doesn't mean it can't happen to you. Here are a few tips, from my personal experience. Hope this helps my fellow members of this list: - Don't be impressed by thousands of positive feedbacks. All say the same (Incredible seller, A++++, lightining fast shippment, blah, blah, blah,..). Instead, read negatives carefully. Seller's replies to negative feedback are also very important. Some sellers are just plain rude or believe that a small amount of money is no reason to leave negative feedback. - If you see a seller with consistent negative feedback, remember that there are probably other negs that have never been left for fear of retaliatory feedback. - Don't be lazy to browse through the seller's feedback history, no matter how many pages it has. - Ask all the questions you feel are necessary. Don't deal with sellers who don't reply to your questions. - Beware of short descriptions with no photos (or just one under-exposed, out-of-focus picture). - Some sellers give you all the information about shipping, but "forget" to answer one or more "sensitive" questions like: "is the lens scratched?". Ask the question again. If they still "forget" to reply or avoid giving a clear answer, don't deal with them. - Being a large business is no excuse for not replying to mails or refusing to give more detailed descriptions. - Beware of "As Is" items. Many times "as is" means "faulty item" and always means "I don't refund". - Beware of sellers that start descriptions with "I don't understand much about cameras...". Visit their other auctions as well as the stuff they sold recently, that still has an auction page archived in eBay. Sometimes you'll find out that they have sold cameras and photo gear many times before. It's just that particular camera that they "don't understand much about". Of course there are many other safety tips but they are easily available on eBay and throughout the net. These ones I learned by myself. Hope you find them useful. Sorry to go off-topic but I think that knowing how to buy gear on-line can be the most hard to learn lesson in photography (and the most expensive).
Regards, Hugo * **** ******* *********************************************************** * For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see: * http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm ***********************************************************
