I bought something from a seller with 0 feedback once... He's now a top rated seller with 99.6% positive feedback.

If it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Awhile back I bought the entire series of Star Trek: Voyager on DVD from a seller with about 500 positive feedback and only a couple negatives for around $150ish after shipping. Turned out they were bootlegs. Oddly enough, the seller replied in a "shocked" manner and offered me a full refund (including both the cost to ship them to me and my cost to ship them back) if I sent them back, which I did, and he did indeed make the refund.

...then several weeks later the seller got over a dozen negative feedback in a row and was removed from eBay. Weird...

But yeah, there's nothing wrong with giving a low-rated seller a chance, though you typically want to ask a lot of questions first to see if they can provide satisfactory answers. I make it a point not to buy from someone I can't communicate with, even if their feedback rating is sky-high. (Because that in and of itself can be suspicious and I have indeed lost money to such a seller before with over 200,000 positive feedback, before I started using PayPal.)

PayPal and eBay are kinda knit together too, so if you pay via PayPal there's various protections in place to ensure you can get your money back if the seller is BSing you, but it's even better not to have to go through that process.

Too good to be true, I think your right.... this one's demanding payment within 2 hours 😜

hmmm 🤣 😀

Yeah, you'll be protected by Paypal. As a seller, I get lots of unnecessary troubles from eBay and Paypal and they are quite a pain in the.... but as a buyer, I'm pampered by them. You'll get your money back if something goes wrong. Just make sure to file the dispute within the stipulated deadline and save all the mails, if any.

Sellers with few or no feedbacks make me wary, especially for expensive items. I let others test the waters first before taking a chance on a brand new seller.

Another way to look at it is to consider it gambling. When you play in the casino one sometimes takes odds that are very much stacked against you in favor of the house. That is how I sometimes just "roll the dice" on sellers / items like this and sometimes I come out ahead / sometimes I do not. 😊

The other consideration is that something may work and then suddenly die. That has happened to me a couple of times already as well. When you play around with vintage / retro / classic hardware that is bound to happen. So I consider all my purchases as a write off from the get go.

This is how it went down.....

The single piece of hardware in question is about $1300 RRP.

This dude with 0 feedback had this item listed as $750 buy it now. An amazing bargain. Listed as brand new.....

I had my eye closely on it......3 hours later he dropped the buy it now to $450........

I bought it right away. But at this point I was beginning to wonder......

I asked him three questions:

1)why did you drop the price.
Answer: its taking up too much space.

Its a bloody video card??

2) Can you send me a photo of the actual item?
Answer: I get sent a believable pic from google images from a review site.

3) Can you send me another pic of the item from another angle so I can see the ports?
Answer:no camera at the moment thats all I have.

Then he told me I have two hours to send payment or he re-lists.

If thats not a classic case of "Your about to get screwed" I dont know what is.

this is what prompted this thread. I dont know how complicated or painful paypals buyer protection scheme is.

Sounds fishy to be honest.

Just a couple really important things of note:

1. DO NOT buy something first and ask questions later. What happens if the person you just bought something from is non-communicative and trying to rip you off? :/

2. There's no way in Hell eBay would allow a seller to file a dispute for non-payment of an item after only a mere two hours. That alone is sketchy enough, though it's entirely possible that this person simply doesn't understand the rules eBay has in place to protect buyers and sellers.

I've said it before and I REALLY want to emphasize the heck out of this again with B I and U tags:

If a listing is too good to be true, DON'T buy it!

When it is a high value item like AUD 450 I would not buy it either. When it is a $10 or $20 item: could be worth a roll of the dice sometimes. I got a MT-32 for $10 including shipping that way 2 months ago. 😊

PeterLI wrote:

When it is a high value item like AUD 450 I would not buy it either. When it is a $10 or $20 item: could be worth a roll of the dice sometimes. I got a MT-32 for $10 including shipping that way 2 months ago. 😊

Here's the rub, though. I've seen new sellers make a reputation by selling a lot of low dollar items and then when they have a lot of positive feedbacks, that's when they turn scammer. They'll sell little stuff like plastic motherboard offsets or coin cell batteries a few hundred times and then out of the blue start listing high dollar items like laptops or televisions and thats when they catch someone who sees their hundreds of positive feedbacks and figures they must be OK without ever checking the substance of those feedbacks.

Excellent observation. You never really know. Even reputable companies can mess it up. I used to buy refurbished notebooks from a Fortune 500 company that has a smaller operation for that. They used to have great service. Then they all of a sudden started messing up orders and not responding to feedback. I had to use PayPal buyer protection to get issues resolved.

Just let him re-list. If he seems to open a dispute, write a mail to eBay support informing of your suspicions and discrepancies in the communications with the seller beforehand. As I have mentioned before, eBay pampers buyers - the reason I'm stopping being a seller nowadays, inspite of having 100% positive feedbacks both as a seller and buyer. Although I agree I only have a total of 400+ feedbacks right now.