How to Buy Used on eBay (2024): A Beginner’s Guide

This brings me to the next important point: price is not the only thing to consider when buying on eBay.

Know the seller

We don’t just want the lowest price; we want best quality product at the lowest price. I found that, unfortunately, photos are not a good indicator of the quality of a product. I bought a lot of things with terrible photos that turned out to be in great condition, and I bought things with great photos that turned out to be rubbish. (I returned them.)

A much better indicator for evaluating the quality of a product is the seller’s rating. A good seller, who is most likely to sell a high quality item in good condition, will have a feedback rating of 99.8% or higher. I very rarely buy from a seller with a review score of 99.6% or less.

There remains a gray area – sellers with a rating of 99.7%. In such cases, click the Detailed Review link and read the latest review. Perhaps there was only one negative rating, and that was a few months ago. Everyone makes mistakes. Sometimes a low rating is due to things that actually happened through no fault of the seller, like a package lost in the mail, so it’s worth reading real reviews and seeing what happened. If a seller has a rating of 99.6 or lower, I personally don’t care what the price is. I don’t suggest.

I’ve bought dozens of laptops, phones, cameras, camera lenses, cast iron cookware, music equipment, and even prepaid mobile phone plans at auctions. During all this time I was only deceived once, but even then they returned the money to me. I didn’t get the item I was looking for, but I didn’t lose anything either.

Still, it’s probably worth repeating: if a deal sounds too good to be true, it is.

How to bet

Once you’ve found the right item and know how much you want to pay, it’s time to… wait. I highly recommend betting only at the last second. And I mean it almost literally. I only bet when there are 5 to 10 seconds left. I wait for the auction to end then watch it on my phone because I think the eBay app has the best interface for real bidding (it’s awful to watch) and in these last few seconds I enter the maximum amount I’m willing to pay .

You don’t bet early because you don’t want to give your competitor a chance to react. If you outbid someone days or even hours before the end of the auction, they will try to outbid you. My guess is that they will come back and outbid you even if you beat their original max bids. You don’t want to give other people time to have the emotional experience of bidding on eBay. Only auctioneers want to drive bidders into an auction fever. We want them to never see us.

Once those last 20 or so seconds are over, you enter your maximum bet. At this point, a kind of automatic bidding war begins. But this one is not emotional. This is machine cold hard logic.