How do you view buying/selling on ebay?

[TexasSP]

Thanks for the replies, just wanted to make sure I wasn't crazy. It appears also that disputes all go through ebay now if bought/sold on ebay and not paypal so the dispute has to be through ebay. I offered him what ebay shows as the final scenario that they come to which is if all else fails return the item and get your money back. The item sold for 60, retails new for around 130, and he paid 21 cents less for shipping than it cost me (I miscalculated shipping costs).

I try to deal honestly with people and offer good prices, I am just trying to recoup a little money to put somewhere else into my hobby, not make a profit by any means. After all, I surely don't make anyone bid on my stuff.

What frustrates me is that every time this has happened the message starts out the same "I never had a problem before on here before but......."

I think the next items will go on craigslist or if I can find a train forum that has a for sale section I will go there. It just eats me up when I know what I sold and I am being as honest as possible when selling.

[JERRY2KONE]

I stopped using ebay a few years ago completely after being hacked three times. I made a few purchases that were very gratifying, but dealing with one bad apple just leaves a bad feeling. Things started out fairly nice, but over the years this site has become too much of a PITA to use safely and without risk. Not sure why the management of ebay have let things get so out of hand, but I am sure that they have gotten tired of dealing with so many arguements as well. I have made many R/C purchases on Ebay, but have never sold anything on there, and now with the way they are handling things I never will.

I have a close personal friend who was doing a very large resale type business on Ebay as well, and seemed to be making quite a lot of money doing so. He was buying up "close out" or liquidation sale items from The Home Depot, and Lowes usually at 10% of their listed retail value, and then re-selling them at wholesale prices on ebay. And at least trippling his investment or better. It seemed pretty trivial up front at first, but once you saw how much stuff he was selling it added up to quite a nice profit. For instance he picked up a pallet load of switches for like $15 and sold $300 switches for $2 a piece. All for a side source of income. He started out just filling his weekends with something to do, and soon was making more money doing business on ebay than on his regular job, and he was making nearly $100K as a PC tech/administrator with a very large company. He finally got tired of dealing with all of the lawyer like crap that was going on within Ebay and just sold everything off and closed his ebay accounts. He left with his sales rated around 98% and has not looked back.

Just find another way.