I buy a good deal from eBay. I have bought movies, anime series, manga, books, art supplies, used video games and CD-ROMs and lots of other miscellaneous odds and ends over the years. Before the pandemic I would sometimes grab vintage clothes there. The most important thing eBay had done for me is helped me find deals on pullip dolls, especially dolls that might be out of stock and necessary to obtain from private collectors. I have bought other pullip-related items like doll wigs from eBay as well for customization.
I have had basically really good experience with the many different eBay sellers I have done business with. I have gotten really good prices, shipping has always been efficient in relation to the destination my items come from, especially US shipping. I have never had a problem with items being packaged poorly and not arriving in good condition. Things are often shipped to me really fast, many times it's free even. Usually things are exactly as they are described or better. I have also gotten personal, handwritten notes from sellers thanking me for supporting their small business. Very seldom have mistakes been made--it happened a couple times, but it was quickly sorted. Once or twice I was scammed by a seller who took the money and didn't send anything, but that's extremely rare, my money got refunded as soon as I reported and the bad sellers were booted instantly. Considering 99% of the time I have great experience on eBay I feel pretty safe using it as a buyer.
I try to avoid auctions on eBay when I can, preferring to use the Buy Now feature whenever it's available, even if it means paying a higher price to avoid drawing out the process for days or a week even, watching a listing also gets nerve-racking. Even with reminders you can easily forget you are bidding on something as time goes by, especially if you are someone who gets a high volume of emails daily, auction notifications are easy to overlook. Also if enough people bid the cost can easily inflate to more than the itemwaw even worth to begin with. What I am most interested in is pullip dolls, and hate bidding against other pullip collectors-- they stop at nothing to get their dolls. They love to not bid anything until literally the last possible second of the auction. You may think you're safe, you have the highest bid and there's only three minutes of auction time left. Then 4 seconds or less before the auction closes you get outbid by 1 dollar, there's not even enough time to refresh the page and type in a counter bid even if you want to. I have had the rug jerked under my feet so many times during auctions that I try to avoid them because of the heartache they can cause.
I only buy at auction if I want it bad, and the seller has no option but to bid and others sellers aren't carrying the product at prices anywhere in the same ball park. My luck is not great at auctions, so if I'm bidding then it's a Hail Mary play, and I expect to swing and miss since it has happened so many times. But a couple of times I have been pleasantly surprised and won the auction. This weekend I won a stylish byul doll for really cheap. It probably helped me that it was Byul, since she was never as popular as Pullip or other members of the family like Taeyang, Dal or even Isul. I was prepared to pay twice what I actually got her for, but fortunately there were only two other bidders who stopped pretty early.
When I am forced to bid I always decide in advance what the highest price I am prepared to pay is, taking shipping and taxes into account, and stay to my budget. This time the kindly doll spirits smiled on me.
