Buyers Guide for Successful EBay Transactions

I am a very cautious person, and I am extremely weary when dealing with someone 100% online and without personal physical contact like eBay allows. I have come up with a method of selecting sellers that so far has worked to 100% accuracy for me. While this may mean that some sellers who are on the up and up are rejected from my selection, it does mean that all of my items have arrived, with very few disputes over the last 4 years of using eBay.

Criteria #1. I view the feedback of the seller carefully. Not just their score because their score is meaningless to me if it is 98.5% positive but in the last month alone they have received over 1,000 negatives. That would be a seller whom I would avoid at all costs. Now in order to have that high a feedback rating they are obviously doing massive amounts of business on eBay, but doing that massive amount of business is obviously leaving people upset for one reason or another. I think I will pass.

Criteria #2. If you have more than six negatives in a month you are moved to my Not in this lifetime stack of sellers. Now to be fair, I will investigate the negatives to see if I feel it was a legitimate reason or not. If you give a seller a negative because the item was non-working when you received it and the auction clearly states non-working or sold As-Is, which is sellers lingo for broken then I'm not going to count that against the seller. However, if the seller is claiming that something is brand new and sealed in the original box and people are complaining about broken parts, non-receipt, or missing stuff from the box then your staying in the not in this lifetime stack.