There’s no shortage of goods and services you can find on eBay. Unfortunately, among those many deals are also scams and suspicious accounts aplenty. Determining whether or not the seller you’re dealing with is legit isn’t always easy, but there are some good indicators that can help with that.
This article will help get you in the know on finding legit sellers on eBay.
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How to Check Your eBay Seller
While it can be difficult to determine legitimate sellers on the internet, fake or dodgy sellers sometimes leave glaring clues as to their intentions. If you keep your wits about you and follow these tips, you should be better prepared:
Check the Seller Feedback
All seller accounts have feedback ratings on their profiles, which the platform always makes front and center. Though the number of reviews is no longer next to the profile name (the number that used to follow a star), it can still be seen by clicking on the positive feedback statistic.
Sellers with many reviews are a better sign. Many sellers on eBay are pretty established by now so they’ll have a great deal of positive ratings. Scam accounts will have fake reviews, so look for feedback that’s vague, not plentiful, or even a large percentage that were posted on the same day. You might run the risk of skipping out on a legit one-time seller, but these are a few and far between. Better safe than sorry.
Detailed Seller Ratings Matter
A purchase on eBay involves a lot of different steps, from payment to shipping. Detailed seller ratings are a way to see that all steps of the journey are above board. If any one area (accurate description, reasonable shipping cost, communication, and shipping speed) is out of balance, then alarm bells should be ringing.
Beware Review Padding and Dodgy Inventories
Many dodgy accounts get their start by selling legitimate goods – albeit of questionable quality – to build up goodwill and review. When the mask comes off, they’ll start charging more, and previous positive reviews will drown out incoming new negative ones. It’s still possible to keep a 90% rating after 100 negative reviews if you’ve stored up 900 positive ones before it.
Be sure to check the inventory of the seller to see the difference between the products they’re offering. If the difference in price and quality is too much, then you’re probably dealing with a scam account.
Read the Negative Reviews
A bad review will often be way more informative than a positive one. Read carefully to find out why buyers have had a problem and if their pain points are a recurring issue across accounts. Shared grievances are the canary in the coal mine.
Stock and AI Photos
Photos that don't seem to be of the actual item on sale should always be treated with suspicion. A quick Google reverse image search will tell you if you’re looking at a stock image. Any item with AI images should raise just as much doubt. The same goes for the product description. If it doesn’t speak to the condition of the item or is too generic, it’s probably not real.
Check the Delivery Time
Six to eight weeks to arrive – it’s a phrase we’ve all heard. Shipping within a country should never take more than a few weeks and not more than a month from overseas (depending on your location, of course). If a seller lists shipping that falls outside your experience or seems too fast to be true, it may be a sign that your item won’t be arriving at all.
Beware Amazing Deals
“If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.” This saying has stuck around for a reason. If a product is way outside the asking price of other sellers offering the same item or doesn’t match up on a price comparison website, then you’re most likely not going to get the deal you’re hoping for, nor the product for that matter.
Verify Another website
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When my sweet old grandmother got caught up in an Amazon gift card scam, I decided then and there that I needed to do whatever I could to inform as many people as possible about the grifters of the world. That’s what I do here – writing about modern scams so you don’t get caught out.
I bought an item on eBay. Checked seller’s feedback and rating, which seemed legitimate. Item arrived on time, delivered by Amazon, in an Amazon bag, and Amazon requested my feed back on item? Checked and Amazon does sell the item but for $10 less! My credit card was charged to e-bay! Was I scammed? Do I need to freeze my credit card?