Scams.

Scams.

Auction buying and selling is becoming more popular nowadays. It is a method of exchanging goods by taking bids of interested buyers and awarding or selling them to the buyer with the highest bid. Usually, these auctioned items are either used products already or can be new ones but have no fixed selling price for these items that is why the seller opted to sell it to an auction. There are numerous online and offline auctions going around almost everywhere. If you are lucky, you can get great deals in these auction sites. However, auctioning items have also been the hobby of scammers out there who want to rip off people with their hard-earned money.

With the vast development of the internet, online auction sites have also become popular. Many people have tried the services of these sites either as a buyer or a seller. Almost all kinds of products can be found in online auctions being sold by people all around the globe. Examples of the more popular online auction sites are eBay and Yahoo! Auctions. These sites are continuously improving and developing advanced technologies to make auctioning more secure for their users. Why are they doing that? It is because scams with auction sites are becoming rampant nowadays. Since the whole bidding process is done online, buyers can only see the product through pictures at the most. Some items do not even have photos. Thus, sellers have a lot of opportunity to say things about their items that are not at all true. And almost half of the time, buyers do not really get what they bid for. Buyers should now be wiser in choosing the right seller of the item they want.

One way to determine if the seller is legitimate and reliable is to check the feedback and reviews given by those who already availed of his items. If the seller does not have a review yet, that could mean that he has not sold anything yet or he is a new user. An example of this is eBay’s User Feedback feature. With this one, a buyer can tell if the seller really offers quality products and really ships the items. Thus, it is advisable for a buyer to always check on the reviews first before making a deal with a seller. Another way is to research on the average selling or bid price of the item. It is seldom that there is only one seller for a particular item in online auction sites. So it is better to check the average bid price of the same item with other sellers. Also, it is a good practice to find out the actual commercial value of the item especially if those items are also available in commercial establishments. If the current highest bid of one particular item is ridiculously lower than its real market value, it is but reasonable to suspect the credibility of the product and the seller. Who knows, that item may just be a knock-off and not the original one. Knowing the real commercial selling price of the item will also help the buyer in limiting his bid. Thus, he will not end up paying more with that item than he should. Since the current terms now of these sites, especially eBay, is for the buyers to send the payment first, buyers should choose the most secure payment option unless they already have an experience with the seller and trusts them. A good payment method is one that will let the buyer give feedback about their purchase, and if he is not satisfied or did not receive the product at all, the company will charge the seller back. It may not be the best but, at least, the buyer has some protection against sellers who do nothing but just scam people. An example of a company who does this is PayPal. Another, which is a relatively new one, is the escrow payment system.

So to avoid making your online auctioning experience a nightmare, try doing the tips mentioned above. It will not hurt to do a little bit of research. After all, it is your hard earned money that is at stake here.