Mick,
There's no shortcuts here; people can give you hints and tips, but if you haven't gone through the experience yourself you probably won't pay as much attention. A lot of it comes down to common sense.
Speaking of which, if you bought 10 cars at an average price of $200 without getting insurance, then this is something you lack!
I started out thinking everything should be insured, but quickly realized that it wasn't worth it on most ordinary items, since insurance doubles or triples the postage cost. It also goes in waves and sometimes depending on locations. In 12 or so years on ebay, I've had two bad patches: one from the UK, where almost a dozen small packages went missing (including some magazines, very unusual), but this is theoretically covered by automatic UK postal insurance, perhaps the only country that does that. And then about 3 or 4 years ago, about 6 package from the States never arrived during the couple months around Xmas - the only time that's happened to me.
Two other common-sense rules:
- If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.
- If the photos are not clear, ask for better ones! One of my first bad experience was just on a cheap HK made Ferrari, where the seller had taken about 10 photos from every angle - except the one showing that the front valence was missing! This has been pretty systematic: everytime a car isn't shown clearly, somebody is being less than honest.
- Corollary to the above: always take the opportunity to contact a seller: you can tell a lot from his reply (assuming you've taken Psych 101).
Don
There's no shortcuts here; people can give you hints and tips, but if you haven't gone through the experience yourself you probably won't pay as much attention. A lot of it comes down to common sense.
Speaking of which, if you bought 10 cars at an average price of $200 without getting insurance, then this is something you lack!
I started out thinking everything should be insured, but quickly realized that it wasn't worth it on most ordinary items, since insurance doubles or triples the postage cost. It also goes in waves and sometimes depending on locations. In 12 or so years on ebay, I've had two bad patches: one from the UK, where almost a dozen small packages went missing (including some magazines, very unusual), but this is theoretically covered by automatic UK postal insurance, perhaps the only country that does that. And then about 3 or 4 years ago, about 6 package from the States never arrived during the couple months around Xmas - the only time that's happened to me.
Two other common-sense rules:
- If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.
- If the photos are not clear, ask for better ones! One of my first bad experience was just on a cheap HK made Ferrari, where the seller had taken about 10 photos from every angle - except the one showing that the front valence was missing! This has been pretty systematic: everytime a car isn't shown clearly, somebody is being less than honest.
- Corollary to the above: always take the opportunity to contact a seller: you can tell a lot from his reply (assuming you've taken Psych 101).
Don
