eBay Experience

[Simsya580]

I have bought all of my gear from ebay the dearest was $1600 from Hong Kong that was an $1100 saving from Harvey Norman. In total I have purchased 2 DSLR,s an a580 and a a77 6 lenses 2 battery grips and a flash, I also bought just recently a Sony nex f3 for travel and a heap of accessories for all my cameras. I have no fear whatsoever about using eBay and the only time anything has gone wrong was a couple times things got lost coming out of china but they were replaced without trouble. I currently have 12 items at various stages of delivery. The trick is to never buy from somebody that has less than a 98% positive feedback and less than a 1000 sales also spend the time to read the feedback and find out what sort of service they provide.

[fabian628]

I have bought all of my gear from ebay the dearest was $1600 from Hong Kong that was an $1100 saving from Harvey Norman. In total I have purchased 2 DSLR,s an a580 and a a77 6 lenses 2 battery grips and a flash, I also bought just recently a Sony nex f3 for travel and a heap of accessories for all my cameras. I have no fear whatsoever about using eBay and the only time anything has gone wrong was a couple times things got lost coming out of china but they were replaced without trouble. I currently have 12 items at various stages of delivery. The trick is to never buy from somebody that has less than a 98% positive feedback and less than a 1000 sales also spend the time to read the feedback and find out what sort of service they provide.

I think a general rule of 1000 sales is a little high. A regular ebayer selling things over many years might only aquire 100-200 feedback, buying from people with less than 20-30 is more risky, also looking at how long they have been on ebay.
Larger sellers also may not have specific knowledge about the item, if they sell 100's of items each week, its likely they do not have much camera specific knowledge (and therefore the listing might not be completly accurate). Amateur sellers sometimes will give good description, good communication and better postal rates.
Of course there are always exceptions, but I personally think with 1/2 decent common sense ebay is not as risky as alot of people make it out to be.

[extraball]

been noticing sellers on ebay with 0 feedback, newly registered, offering expensive camera gear, and often starting at .99cents I hope no-one gets stung, but they must, otherwise the scammers wouldn't go to the trouble.