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No longer an Ebay virgin
I am officially no longer an Ebay virgin. Despite years of interest (and a good friend who is a veteran seller) with no buying or selling, I finally bought something on Ebay. What I bought is a Nikon D50 DSLR. I have been eyeing DSLRs for a while, never having the nerve (or the money) to actually buy one. I thought I would document my experience in case others are interested. My first step in the adventure was to pick a target camera. I picked two -- the Nikon D50 or the Canon XT - the low end of the two premier manufacturers lines and the most likely to be within my price range. Next I did pricing investigations. The best place to do that online is B&H PhotoVideo or Adorama. They are two very large Manhattan camera stores with a large online and brick and mortar presence and solid reputations for selling a wide range of equipment at the best prices. Being in Canada I also did price searches at Hit Camera - they seem to have the best online prices for goods sold from Canada (I am not sure about their reputation though -- they do have a small camera store on Avenue Road in Toronto). Next I went looking for a possible Ebay seller. I wanted to avoid the small, no name people and so settled on Cameta Camera. They have a very large mail order/Ebay business (and from all appearances a store in Amityville on Long Island). At the time of writing they had sold upwards of 130,000 items on Ebay over the last 5+ years and had a solid reputation on Ebay's buyer/seller rating system. Their current rate of selling is 5000-6000 items per month (200 per day or so), so they do a substantial business. During the search for a possible camera buy I used the My Ebay tableau a lot -- it allows you to "Watch" items and to keep track of those you are bidding on. I established searches that informed me by email when possible items came up for auction. Later I found the same searches are available via RSS, so for many that might be a better choice. I stayed away from "Buy it Now" and settled on "Auctions Only" entries with no or low reserve. I quickly found that this eliminated the Canon XT from the mix. I also found that Cameta tends to auction off DSLR packages (usually with a camera, a case and one or two lenses). I am sure this is an attempt to bulk up and make the product seem more substantial and generate emotional appeal (after all selling/buying is often an emotional game). In order to determine the "real" value of the packages you should do some research. I settled on a number of packages that might suit me (and avoided those in which I had no interest) and carefully priced the package at B&H and Adorama, then established a 60% of retail policy. I decided that was the maximum I was willing to pay, hoping to catch a bargain. I bid on dozens of packages, some bids very low just to get a flavour for what was going on. Some I continued to bid on until my limit was reached, others I just abandoned. Eventually to my surprise I was succesful, finding a package that met my budget and other expectations. Being in Canada and buying in the U.S., there were a number of other considerations. Many camera manufacturers (Nikon is one of those) have separate warranties for product sold in Canada and the U.S. (from what I can tell Canon has a North America wide warranty so in that they are more attractive. So if you buy in the U.S. you are giving up local warranty. Also shipping across the border can be problematic. All the courier companies play games there -- many attempt to rip you off with exorbitant "brokerage" fees. The best way to ship across the border seems to be via USPS which has apparently very good reciprocal ties with Canada Post (in my case I tracked the delivery on the USPS site until it left Kennedy International, then was able to track on the Canada Post site until delivery). The whole delivery process (from the time I paid for the item at Cameta until it was delivered to my door) took 4 business days. I think you have to pay close attention to the shipping information and cost in the auction information. In my case it added 10% to the cost of the transaction and was probably close to the actual cost of the delivery to the seller. Many sellers though make a large profit in the shipping (selling two dollar items with $25 dollar shipping). You also have to pay close attention to the payment options. Some sellers only accept PayPal, some will not accept PayPal at all. It may be necessary to establish a PayPal account to do business with some (and you should do this before bidding). A few smaller sellers will not ship anywhere outside the U.S. so pay attention! Canada Post does collect GST (and PST if appropriate) and charges a small flat fee for handling the tax ($8 dollars in my case). All in all it was quite an exhilarating experience. I am not much of a "shopper" usually but this definitely was a positive "shopping" adventure.
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