I started buying vintage on Ebay years ago. Of the first forty-two pieces I bought, thirty-eight were either, not as described, were repaired, arrived damaged or were fakes. The forty-second object was a wonderful treasure. I quickly forgot the previous forty-one duds and never again looked back.
If you are new to Ebay, before you begin bidding, always look at the seller’s feedback. If they have a big feedback score and it is ninety-nine percent positive, there’s a good chance they are honest. But always bear in mind that the feedback system works both ways and even people with a complaint are often reluctant to give bad feedback in case it is unjustly reciprocated.
The best thing about Ebay is the bidding system. Unlike a live sale, there is no auctioneer to run you up by taking bids “off the wall”. The computer handles all the bids and only increases each bid by set increments. An object may have a bid of $1.00 on it, but you decide you would be prepared to bid $1000. Well go ahead and bid $1000. The computer holds your bid, but will only increase the visible bid by whatever the next increment is – say $1 – so the visible bid becomes $2. If nobody else bids, it will be yours for $2.
You may have noticed an object you are watching only has a very small bid on it right to the very end of the auction and then leaps by hundreds, even, thousands of dollars in the final seconds. This is usually due to sniper bids executed by computer. For a small fee you can use this facility too. Create an account at a site like Auction Sniper. You can automatically import Ebay items from your watching file, decide on your bids days in advance and even watch the final seconds tick away as the auction closes
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