Yes I understand that people buy and sell crap on the site. I even tried to read thru a wikipedia entry on it. I still do not get it.
Is everything auctioned?
How can people pay me for something I want to sell?
How can I trust they will pay me?
How do they get the stuff?
Some are auctioned, some are sold via Buy It Now. This allows the seller to say: I want this much for it, and the buyer to say, that’s fine, I’ll buy it now.
Paypal is one way to accept payments. If you don’t want to pay the fee, you can accept checks or money orders.
Some won’t pay you. If you don’t use an online payment account, then you should wait for the payment to arrive and the check to clear.
The people usually get their stuff by you shipping it to them. Some auctions, for large items, require the buyer to pick it up. These types of auctions usually limit the target sales to your local area or a fanatic about the product you are selling.
**Khadji **pretty much covered it all quite succinctly, but on the question of how you can trust that people will pay you, everybody that uses eBay has a “feedback” rating. That’s the number in parentheses after the person’s user name.
That number is the number of transactions the person has been involved in, as either a buyer or seller. If you click on a person’s user name, you can see a profile that includes his/her feedback rating, expressed as a percentage of positive comments, and you can read what other buyers/sellers who have done business with that person say about the transaction.
The seller doesn’t have a lot of control over who bids (although some sellers will specify in their auctions that they will only accept bids from people with no negative feedback or who have a feedback rating of X number of transactions), but you can at least get a sense of whether you’re dealing with someone with a good track record.
I’ve never used ebay, but I’ve often wondered if ebay maybe represents something good about humanity–because millions of people there seem to trust each other.
It seems different than the old days:Whenever I’ve bought or sold used cars or other stuff, I’ve always done it thru the want ads in the local newspaper.And there was always a whiff of distrust, and even hatred, in the air.
examples: Somebody calls to ask about my used car and promises to come see it that afternoon–then he doesn’t show up. Or I call to ask details about something for sale, and then drive over to their house only to find that its already been sold. And then there’s the old question of “will you take a check?” and the answer was usually “NO WAY”. And all this for local transactions where the money and the goods echange hands immediately,( not several days apart), and with somebody you meet who lives in the same city, so theoretically could be traced.
But on ebay----you send your money and then have to wait a few days for a package to appear, sent by a totally anonymous person who you never see. And everybody seems to love it. .
sure there’s feedback–but what is to stop somebody from generation false feedback? Say, by selling a hundred cheap items honestly at a couple bucks each, and having his buyers write a hundred good feedbacks. Then offer for sale a couple expensive items, for thousands of dollars, but take the money and run?
I don’t get it.
But it does seem to work.
Yes - there is a lot of crap sold (my daughter has just bought 3 “Steps” dolls :smack: ) but there is a lot of good stuff as well. Mobiles, memory sticks, software, etc - the best prices I’ve found have been on eBay.
The feedback is the key to trust. Of course it would be possible to generate false feedback but probably easy to spot - the profile of the person leaving the feedback is also available. When you think of it, every purcase you make on the internet requires trust and in most cases (other than Amazon 
) you’re sending your money off to a company that you only know from their website.