I have been buying stuff on Ebay for sometime now & wanted to know if anyone else here goes on Ebay to buy stuff or just browse around? I myself look for comics and related mearchindise (toys, posters) that sort of stuff. What about you?
Yes I buy, it all depends on what I'm needing or wanting to get. Form MP3 accessories to photography gear to Snoopy pens. I've bought a few items.
I buy from eBay, usually Australian eBay but ocasionally from the British or American eBay. Nowadays I mainly buy secondhand books, rubber ducks, and occasionally DVDs though the DVDs I buy are usually because I friend has asked me to purchase one for them. I prefer 'Buy It Now' rather than bidding on items. I also buy off Oztion which is the second biggest auction site in Australia.
Sure, I buy and sell on eBay a bit. I try to avoid using it to sell as much as possible though since most of their changes over the past year seem geared towards making life as difficult and unprofitable as possible for small-volume, high-value amateur sellers. Still, it's useful to buy branded goods on discount or to find obscure bits of paraphernalia.
Its also bad for people selling very cheap items. I used to sell Coles swapcards on eBay. These are swapcards that were sold at a department store in the 1950s and 1960s. I, and my sister, each had a collection. Though it was worthwhile selling the cards we would make good money (say from $10 to $60 or more a card) for selling our cards that weren't in good condition it wasn't worthwhile. These cards were only sold for $1 or so and with the listing fees and picture fees we didn't male enough on each card. So I started selling them on Oztion which only has a fee on the final sale. All up, we made about $3,600 selling the two collections.
I buy plenty of things on ebay... probably about 300 purchases over the years. Many of them involve electronics. All eight or so laptops I've owned have been eBay purchases as well as several desktop PC components and peripherals. My Canon DSLR equipment is all ebay stuff too. eBay is the lone source for my flip clock collection. Most recently I bought a housing, battery and keyboard membrane to repair and refurbish a broken Blackberry 8800 I was given.
Well done on finding a more profitable venue. I've done something similar - I sell directly through a few specialist forums rather than eBay whenever possible. No middleman, much simpler, much more profitable. Trouble is, sometimes you have an item that doesn't shift, and you need the market share of potential buyers that eBay has to move it. It really can behave as a quasi-monopoly, given the share of the online auction market it has, though.
There was only a few people who were actually buying my cards. They were all avid Coles card collectors and they all found their way over to Oztion without me having to tell them. I used to put up 8 cards a day starting at 6pm. There were women rushing home from work to try and buy cards. On Oztion I always sold them as BuyItNow and most card sold within a minute of me posting them. Some less common cards I was putting up at $20-25 and they sold just as quickly. However the rare cards that I knew could bring more than $25 I sold on eBay as auctions.
I have never needed anything that badly. It just doesn't seem worth the hassle. I've heard stories of people who buy laptops and get a box of bricks (or, and this really cracks me up, iPods where the box actually has smoked MEAT in it ), for example. Plus, Ebay requires Paypal, which I also refuse to use.
I just checked ebay's website, and there are other options, but they are all similar to Paypal in that they are separate accounts you have to sign up for. That's another hassle I prefer to avoid.