I buy and sell on ebay regularly up to a couple of grand per deal. After 250 plus transactions, I have been burned just once (on a $260 inflatable) and it looks like ebay's insurance may pay $175 of it. That being said, in order to actually collect against the insurance, you have to jump through quite a few hoops.

I collect mint US commemorative postage stamps and I gotta say that every single dealer and collector I have dealt with so far have been honest to a fault. Further, in my experience, they represent (in general) the ethics of the stamp collecting community as a whole.

I also bought a car from Ebay, sight unseen. This one just happened to turn out to be a real winner and I consider myself lucky. I'll probably buy another, though next time I'll make sure somebody I trust gets a lookover before I close the deal. To tell you the truth, I always prided myself on being a 'kicking the tires' kinda guy, but this last time I got caught up in auction fever and ignored my rules for buying. Like I said , got lucky that time, next time I won't leave anything to luck.

Just last night I was high bidder on some, please don't shoot me, waverunners. One for each of my kids. I phoned the seller in the midst of the auction. Found out the service record and maintenance completed on them and then phoned the actual SeaDoo dealer to make sure the story I was told held true. The SeaDoo dealer gave me some pretty good advice as well. Since I'm buying them in the winter, the dealer recommended I get a letter from the seller stating that if I encountered any problems upon 'first splash' in the spring the seller would cover them.

We'll see. It's still somewhat of a crap-shoot.

Ricochet.

I'm like everyone else, I've had for the most part, good experiences on it. I have purchased some fairly large items on it, such as digital camera and some high dollar software. I have been burnt a couple of times, but continue to do business on it. My feelings about buying a large ticket item is that you can also be burnt looking at the item in person. So like Ricochet said it's a crap-shoot.

Les

Personally I have had real good experiences with E-Bay.