Like the idea of eBay but too daunted to give it a try? This little book provides all the answers to the questions you were too afraid to ask, in a user-friendly, jargon-free way and – in true eBay style – for a bargain price. Bursting with bite-sized nuggets of wisdom, this step-by-step guide for the uninitiated includes advice on everything from selling a picture frame to buying the car of your dreams. Whether you’d like to set up a stall or simply haggle at the world-famous online marketplace, this is the perfect companion for any budding ‘eBayer’. What are you waiting for?

In just over a decade, eBay has transformed itself from a niche collector’s fair to a massive centre for global commerce. Now professional online retailers sell their goods on eBay alongside mums with second-hand baby clothes. In the last year more than 50,000 Britons used eBay as a place to make a little extra cash or secure a bargain. My own introduction to eBay began with a two-year-old car with 48,000 miles on the clock. No garage would touch it with a barge pole and adverts in the press had generated no response. In desperation – and, I admit, with little hope of selling it – I put it on eBay. When the auction ended seven days later, and after some bargaining by e-mail, a lovely couple from East Sussex arrived at my house with £4,000 in cash. Inspired by the success of this unlikely sale, I next turned my attentions to my £300 Ikea sofa which, though adequate, I wanted to replace with a sofabed. My premise was simple; if I could get someone to take it away, it was worth doing. If I could get someone to pay me and take it away, it was really worth doing! I started the auction at £20, hoping it might reach £70. A week later – after several increasingly over-excited phone calls from my sister (‘It’s gone up again!’) – my 6-year-old sofa sold for £160. The new owners did a 150mile trip in a borrowed van to collect it and I got a hassle-free transaction and a hefty deposit on the furniture to replace it. It’s easy to read these two accounts and wonder if the people involved were, to put it frankly, a little insane, but there are two sides to every sale on eBay. The couple who purchased my car had done their research and knew that that make of car was built to manage a high mileage, plus they only wanted it as a second car and so within a couple of years that high mileage would have averaged out to something more reasonable. The pair who bought the sofa needed something to furnish a buy-to-let flat they owned. Even the cheapest settee they could buy new would have cost £100 more than the price they bid on mine, so in the end the saving was worthwhile to them. Whilst one half of eBay activity consists of people happily exchanging the contents of their lofts and garages for cash, the other half involves lucky punters finding the kind of bargains you used to be forced to trawl car boot sales and the classifieds for. Although I started as a seller on eBay, I quickly became a buyer. For years I’d been trying to track down The Cosby Show on DVD. I then found it, but it was only available to members of a movie club in America and to join the club you had to have an address in the United States. I thought I’d reached a dead end until I tried searching for it on eBay and found there was a thriving trade in second-hand copies of the discs. Now I use eBay as the first port of call for everything I buy. Recently I’ve bought a secondhand North Face ski jacket which was £185 less than the retail price and a brand new pair of Nike trainers, one of several on sale at a Buy It Now price of £19.99 because they were last year’s design. eBay offers the chance to secure the kind of bargains you feel compelled to tell people about and to find a new home for the most extraordinary of possessions. Now the time has come to introduce you to a website that will (and I don’t say this lightly!) change your life and your shopping habits forever. Have fun!

 

Clare is a writer and broadcaster who runs her own dating website and organises speed dating events.

 

The Beginner's Guide to Buying and Selling on eBay by Clare McCann
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