Sort of OT: Ebay results, Have you gotten what you paid for? Options

[Pat Garvey]

Excuse me if this has been done before - couldn't find it on a search.

Ebay purchases, or sales.

What is your overall feeling? Get what you paid for? Get stiffed on a buy? Products as advertised?

I've bought & sold things, and for the most parts evrything went as plan. Not all, but close.

Bought things that looked OK, but were trash when I got them. OK, the chances you take based on crappy photos. Rare, but it has happened.

What's the general consensus?

[anthony]

Out of my hundreds of transactions and my 4 or 5 ebay disappointments, three actually involved 914 parts. One was a center console that was advertised as being in good condition and while it didn't have any seem splits it had at least 10 small cigarette burns. That was a total turn off to me. The pictures looked good because you can't seem small imperfections in black vinyl in a small digital pic. The other was some fuel injection parts that were pretty cheap and turned out to be rusty pieces of shit that weren't worth the shipping cost. The last was a 914 engine grill that got bent in shipping because the seller put it in a long skinny box. So less than $100 in problems and I've saved tens of thousands of dollars.

Here's an example of a huge savings. I installed a new wireless lan at work this summer. It's an all proxim wlan with enterprise class hardware. The access points normally costs $500/each. I bought 20 on ebay for an average price of $150/each. I also found $500 POE switches for $50. I saved my employer $8,000 alone just on that project and I got the 8000 Skymiles or my trouble. I'm going to buy a Dell rack mount server this week. It will be $2K less than Dell sells the same thing for - warranty included.

In general you'll do better with commodity items on ebay where condition isn't much of an issue. I've mostly stopped buying 914 parts on ebay unless they are new because of the condition issues.