Getting righ to the point; how do you guys go about buying / selling online? I tried once in the past and it blew up in my face. I was qutting Evercrack and decided to use playerauctions.com to sell my stuff figuring I could get a pretty penny for my years wasted. Well; I got a buyer and got my money ($150) and was fat & happy. Then paypal told me (summarized) that the person who paid me was not in-fact that person and that someone had hacked his/her account and summarily demanded that I pay Paypal the $150. After a month of trading e-mails with Paypal and the scammed person; which started with; I've been scammed to, please offer me some help also; and ended with a series of f**k you e-mails since both parties were telling me the same thing; Ark, you're on your own. To conclude my sad, sad tale I never got my money or my stuff back and the experience left me a little scarred and scared me off the online trading market and left me full of hate for the a**holes @ Paypal who saw me floating and sped away.

Well; times change and so do people and I'm now looking at getting new stuff for my PC; issue being as I'm only 16 funds are tight (McDonalds only gives me so many hours...) and I feel I'd be letting a sizeable amount of $$$ go to waste if I didn't re-sell some parts of my current system.

This time however; some things are going to be different. First of all I only plan to sell via forums (PR, OCforums and Xtremeforums) and hopefully sell all my jazz in those 3 places as I've got 13XX, 4XX and 2XX posts resp. in those places and feel I can in general trust the populace not to be as anonymous as joe buyer on playerauctions.

So thats what I know I can control and do differently. Only there's one small problem; with the whole Paypal fiasco my parents (who hold the only credit cards in the house) said no-no to Paypal so if I did put the gloves back on and jump back into their ring I'd be stuck only using my funds online as there's no way in hell I'm giving them my bank info.

So, after my sad little story here come the questions;

1) Is it Paypal or the highway for online trading? I've seen checks and MO's mentioned but auctions that reject Paypal seem to burn unless the deal is good enough.

2) how do you ship? I have a Mailboxes Ect. (now UPS store I think) that I'd probably go to with my items to ship in small boxes; I'm guessing I just bring those in and tell them where I want them to go; fork over some moola and watch the tracking number right? Then again I have a few big boxes and for some reason I collect foam peanuts so maybe I can pack it up and bring in a box and an address and see where it goes, no?


So, is there any hope for me or am I being to resilliant and rebellious to how online tradings done?

Also if anyone wants to toss in their $.02 I'd love to hear it

~Ark out

Well, I use eBay for my Voodoo collection, nobody here has 5500's and the only place I know to get them is eBay, that's where i got mine.

Mostly older hardware I need for a mod theme like motherboards and videocards I get off eBay. Don't buy or sell complete systems off eBay, I had a friend get ripped 60 buxx0rz from an eBayer who was selling a Dell Precision workstation barebones system and it was never sent. I have heard many other horror stories about that.

Also check out their feedback before you bid.

If you need stuff like motherboards or older video cards or whatever eBay is the way to go but if you can get it at the Egg than do so accordingly. eBay is also good for finding that hard-to-find hardware for your mod theme, like for me, since I'm old skool, I can get rare K6-2+ 550's with the 192K cache instead of 64K like on the normal K6-2.

I just pack my stuff up and ship via USPS, because it's closer to my house. As for PayPal, I use PayPal for everything and haven't had any problems uptil recently when I started getting fake emails saying my account was hacked and would be canceled, etc.

Since PayPal is out for you, just go with money orders. For myself, PayPal has been good to me so far (oh please don't jinx it now :S) and so have the money orders.

Never sell stuff to people that don't have a good rep either, just because you have one doesn't make it safe that somebody else with 200 posts and been there for a while since people turn bad real quick.

Always ship via USPS, those mailbox ETC stores rip you off by charging a fee for convenience. Just because the UPS station is half an hour away where you can ship for the price quoted online makes them realize they can charge you for going to a place that's closer.

For shipping, make sure you pack everything real good (antistatic bags, then bubblewrapped, and then put in a box with a good amount of those peanuts). Once you can't hear anything moving in the box after shaking it real good means it's ready to be shipped. If you're afraid that shaking it around too hard will break it, then chances are it's not packed well enough. The automated shipping systems they have now are rough.

Also, make sure your return address is in the correct place and printed clearly. Do the same with the address your shipping with, but make sure it's big and easily readable.

Well, Paypal isn't out out; its just that if I use Paypal, what happens online stays online. So I could use the money to buy/sell online but I couldn't transfer...


edit:: thnaks all

Used PayPal for over five years and sent about $2500 through them on payments, but quit when they demanded my bank account number for "verification" purposes. If my history wasn't enough, then I don't need to do business with them.

Using e-Bay is safe and the only sure way not to get burned selling items is to accept money orders only, either from USPS or Western Union. Both are serialized and are easy to track. Someone states that you didn't send the merchandise, demand the money order number. Both companies will tell you whether or not it's been issued, cashed, and where it was cashed at.

Almost got burned by some dlck in L.A. over a James Bond DVD box set. Paid him, sent him two e-mails, and he said that he would ship it out the next day. After five more e-mails and four more weeks of not hearing from him, I contacted the other buyers (it was a dutch auction for 40 sets) and they never received any either. So, I ended up contacting the California Attorney General's office, the L.A. County Sheriff's office, the Southern California Better Business Bureau (he had a store front), the U.S. Better Business Bureau, e-Bay, the Federal Trade Comission, the US Bureau of Consumer Protection (also FTC), and the criminal investigators at the USPS.

Needless to say, I got my money back in the mail about two weeks later. All the letter (plain white paper) said was "Here is your refund check for $40.00. Thank you for doing business." Cashed it, haven't heard back yet eight months later.

So, money order is the only way to go. Accept only from the U.S. and Canada (and maybe the U.K....can't be to sure about those guys ).

Rob

money orders are definitely the way to go. Nothing is quite so secure in the online buying world.

I think that's a good strategy (building up rep/posts here, selling to others with good rep/posts). As a buyer, I wouldn't be hesitant at all about sending you a money order for something I wanted. (Hey, you don't have a name-brand 256MB stick of PC133 you want to get rid of, do you? )