I posted this in another thread (it was from my personal experience), but it dawned on me that someone might miss it so I will give it a thread of its own.

This may be old news to some, but it caught me off guard even after spending 9 years transacting on Ebay.

"The other day I was considering purchasing a pen from a seller with 169 positive and 0 negative feedbacks. As I looked deeper into his history, I found that most of his feedbacks came from him bidding on and winning 1 cent auctions that were only there to beef up the feedbacks of all concerned. Ebay needs to stop this practice, as without those activities this seller would not have had over 4 feedbacks and I would have never even considered making an expensive purchase from him. A casual glance said 169 positive feedbacks with 0 negs. A deeper look said 4 total viable positive feedbacks."

Unfortunately, this kind of feedback puffing is becoming increasingly common. It really makes a mockery of EBay's feedback rating system. It's also an insult to EBayers, because the feedback puffers obviously believe that many EBayers will simply be satisfied with a 100% feedback rating, and never take the extra minute or two to actually read the feedback. An informed public is the best way to combat this kind of abuse.

My recommendation is that people new to eBay should not buy anything for the first two months. Instead, they should spend the two months "watching" the items they are interested in and get to know who the regular sellers are. After a while, they will learn to trust certain sellers without having to read the feedback, and they will learn which prices are too good to be true or too high to warrant a bid.

It's a bit like going to the horse races and placing "bets" with yourself rather than at the betting window. You learn quickly what might have happened had you bet real money on the race!

Darn fine idea................

Real simple, just remember this ... Buyer beware

Another issue to keep in mind is shill bidding, where the person auctioning the merchandise uses other eBay accounts to artificially bid-up the price of his/her merchandise. This is one reason to avoid "private" auctions, since you can't research the bid history of the other bidders.

-Mike

Thsse are all definitely good suggestions/ideas.

Use this to help spot shill bidding - a very useful tool