Each time you buy or sell something on eBay, people can leave feedback for you, and you can leave feedback for them. This feedback can be positive, negative, or neutral, along with a comment. Your feedback rating, then, is worked out using a very simple sum: the number of positive feedback comments people have left for you, minus the number of negative ones. This means that someone with a feedback rating of 28, for example, might have 30 positive ratings and 2 negative ones.

If you are a considerate buyer, then you should find that positive feedback will just appear next to your username, without you needing to do anything. If you want to help it along, though, there are a few things you can do.

• Always leave feedback for others: People will feel an obligation to leave feedback for you if you leave it for them (eBay will send you an email after each transaction to offer you the opportunity). Take the time to write a positive comment about sellers who do what they should and the chances are they’ll do the same for you.
  
  
• Pay promptly: Sellers love nothing more than to be paid promptly – paying as soon as the auction ends saves the seller all sorts of worry, especially if you pay by credit card or another electronic method. You will often find that your positive feedback appears within a few minutes of you paying if you pay as soon as the auction ends.
  
  
• Don’t be a difficult customer: Understand that your seller might take a day or so to respond to you, and perhaps a few days to send your item – harassing them is nasty and unnecessary, and won’t get you good feedback.
  
  
• Build relationships: If a seller sells a lot of a certain kind of thing you like, buy from them a few more times. They will be very happy to find a regular customer, and will go out of their way to leave positive feedback like ‘a joy to deal with as ever’. Also, they might offer you a few special deals!
  
  
• Sellers won’t generally be reluctant to sell to buyers without much of a reputation, simply because it is the buyer who takes most of the risk in a transaction. It is worth remembering, however, that transactions where you are the seller and where you are the buyer are counted towards the same feedback total – so if you ever want to start selling, being a good buyer is especially worthwhile.

On eBay, people pay far more attention to sellers’ ratings than they do to buyers’ – most sellers can’t be bothered to check their buyers’ feedback, while bad feedback on a seller can (and should) be a dealbreaker. When you are buying, then, you need to worry more about the seller’s reputation than you do about your own.

1. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is: This holds for everything in life, but especially for auction sites such as eBay. Things that seem too cheap are usually too cheap for a reason – it might be a complete scam, or the items might just be of extremely poor quality. Investigate before you go further.
   
   
2. Know the value of what you want to buy: There are people on auction sites such as eBay who regularly bid such high prices for used cameras that they might as well have gone out and bought them brand new. Check around for prices first.
   
   
3. Only bid on real things: auction sites such as eBay has plenty of people who are trying to sell all sorts of schemes and scams. It is never worth bidding for these, no matter how cheap they might be.
   
   
4. Don’t do anything outside auction sites such as eBay: Occasionally people will ask you to send them money outside auction sites such as eBay, to avoid the fees auction sites such as eBay charges sellers. Any money you send this way is entirely insecure – don’t do it.
   
   
5. Be careful where you send payment: People may hack into others’ accounts, and ask you to send payment to addresses that auction sites such as eBay has not confirmed as belonging to that account – you might send your money and receive nothing in return.
   
   
6. Look out for sellers who suddenly change what they sell: Sellers can look like they’ve made lots of transactions, when really they’ve never sold anything of worth. If they suddenly start selling $1,000 televisions, steer clear – the chances are they’re planning to run off with the money.
   
   
7. Beware the shill bidder: If someone who doesn’t seem to have bought anything before is constantly outbidding you on a certain item, be suspicious. It might be a seller ‘shill bidding’ to force up his item’s price.
   
   
8. Don’t use the seller’s escrow service: If an escrow service is recommended to you by a seller, it could well be owned and run by them – and they’re quite likely to keep your money and send you nothing.
   
   
9. Pay electronically: You are more likely to be able to recover any losses if you pay using a credit card instead of sending out cheques and money orders – these low-tech payment methods can’t be tracked as easily.
   
   
10. Buy from reputable sellers: Each seller has a number next to their name, which is their feedback rating. The higher this rating, the more you can trust them.
    
    
11. On that last point, feedback ratings are the most important way that buyers and sellers can protect themselves on auction sites such as eBay – and you, as a buyer, have a rating too! Now that you won’t get ripped off, the next email will be all about your rating, and what you can do to make sure people know that you’re not going to rip them off either.

The Right to Receive Your Item.

Maybe the seller never sent the item, or maybe it got lost in the post. Whatever happened, you paid for the item. If it doesn’t arrive in the post as described, you have the right to a replacement or a refund, whether it’s the seller’s fault or not.

The fact that you bought something on eBay doesn’t mean that you don’t have the exact same rights that you would have if you bought it in a shop (these rights are pretty much the same all over the world). Plus, under eBay’s rules, the seller isn’t allowed to change their mind about selling you the item: once the auction ends, it becomes a contract – you must buy and they must sell, or face eBay’s penalties.

The Right for Your Item to Be as Described in the Auction.

Sometimes sellers don’t wrap items properly, and so they get broken. Occasionally they write descriptions that are misleading or just plain wrong to begin with, leaving out vital details that would have caused you to change your mind about buying. If this happens to you, you again have the right to a replacement or a refund.

So How Do I Use My Rights?

First, you should take it up with the seller – most will be responsive, as do not want to have their reputation damaged when an upset buyer leaves negative feedback for all their future buyers to see. If that doesn’t work, report them to eBay.

While eBay don’t have many people handling complaints, they do have a relatively effective set of automatic process to handle common problems buyers and sellers have with one another.

Finally, if that doesn’t work, then you should seek advice from consumer groups in your country, and as a last resort from the police. You should never have to get this far, though: problems on eBay that can’t be resolved easily are extremely rare.

Don’t Be Too Quick.

Remember not to get too annoyed and be unfair to the seller: nice sellers have agreed to give me refunds for undelivered items, only for me to find out a few weeks later that they were being held for me at the post office! Always try your best to communicate and think of everything that might have gone wrong: eBay works best when buyers and sellers sort out their problems together, instead of reporting each other to the authorities straight away.

More often that not receiving what they paid for, buyers have an altogether different problem: they knew what they were paying for, but didn’t realise that what they were paying for was overpriced, low quality or a scam. The next email will give you a list of tips on how to avoid being ripped off on eBay.

So What is eBay?

eBay is an online auction website – and not just any auction site, but the biggest one in the world. If you know how an auction works, then you already know how roughly eBay works. Someone adds something they want to sell to the site, and then buyers come along and place bids on it. The highest bid wins the item! It’s that simple.

eBay being an online auction makes a big difference, though. Buying and selling are not reserved for any elite. eBay accept almost any item, no matter how small, and will then advertise it on their sites all over the world. It’s a powerful combination of an auction and a slightly chaotic marketplace.

What is Bidding?

Bidding is when you say how much you will pay for an item in an auction. Bidding on eBay, however, doesn’t work in exactly the same way as a normal auction, at least in theory. On eBay, you tell the site what the maximum you are willing to pay for each item is, and then eBay places the bids on your behalf. That means you could say you were willing to pay up to $100 for something and only have to pay $50, if that was the highest maximum bid anyone else placed.

It’s not as complicated as it sounds – the best way to get used to it is to give it a try. First, the best thing to do is to go to the eBay website designed for your country. If you don’t know the address for it, just go to www.ebay.com and it will tell you there. Now, on the front page you should see a big box marked ‘search’: just type in anything that you’d like to buy there.

Wasn’t that easy? Now you should have a list of items for sale in front of you, along with how much people are currently bidding for them and the time when bidding ends for each item. If you click one of these, you can read the description, and then – if you’re happy with the item and happy to pay more than the current highest bidder is – you can bid!

How Do I Bid?

Go ahead and scroll down to the bottom of an item’s description page, and type the maximum you are willing to pay (your maximum bid) into the box. Then simply press the ‘place bid’ button – you will need to sign in once you press the button, or go through a quick registration process if you don’t have an eBay username).

If someone else’s maximum bid on that item is higher than yours, then eBay will tell you and give you the opportunity to bid again. Otherwise, you’re now the new highest bidder! All you need to do now is wait until the end of the auction – if someone else outbids you, then eBay will email you and you can bid again.

All sounds great, doesn’t it? But by now you might be wondering whether a site as chaotic as eBay can really be all that safe to buy from. That’s why the next email in this series will be about your rights when you buy from eBay.

Sadly though, whenever a good idea comes along, the seedier side of humanity is sure to be not that far behind, sliding along in it's wake leaving a gooey trail behind themselves.

So it is on eBay. Some estimates holds that nigh on 37% of the worlds counterfeit and fake goods are sold daily on eBay.

Having seen some of the listings I can fully believe it.

Especially where designer label goods are concerned.

Take a look at just about any page of Louis Vuitton items listed on eBay and on average you'll find 95% of them on each page are fake.

So how can you avoid the easy to make mistake of buying a cheap quality fake LV?

Learn.

Learn as much as you can about the specific item you're interested in.

Don't go trawling eBay for ideas on what to buy and expect to be able to find a prize, hidden away deep in the listings. There are LV addicts who spend the best part of the day doing just that, trawling the auctions, checking and rechecking, looking for the bags that are being sold by owners with little knowledge, owners who are selling at a price away below what it should be. Then they'll "snipe" the auction in the last few seconds - right out from under your nose!

If you really want to buy a pre owned LV then your best bet would be to go to a consignment store and see if they can get hold of one for you. They'll have a constantly changing stock of second hand authentic items for you to choose from and you're fairly assured of it being genuine.

But if you really must buy your LV off eBay then try to use one of the approved LV sellers.

Who or what is an approved LV seller, you may well ask?

Well, there are two sets of LV sellers and buyers who have proven themselves, over a period of time as well as a set number of successful sales of authentic goods, and who have a distinction awarded by one of two "bodies".

The two bodies are MyPoupette and ALVA (Authentic Louis Vuitton Addicts).

A MyPoupette recommended seller is known as an MPRS (My Poupette Recommended Seller) and an ALVA recommended seller is known as an ALVA SS (ALVA Seller Select).

Both of these lists have a criteria that any seller MUST meet before being granted the "badge". That criteria requires a certain number of authentic only items to have been sold with supporting feedback and good trading practice before they can qualify.

Once they are awarded this distinction they are then allowed to use that title and badge in their auctions.

Now, although nothing in life is guaranteed, you can be much more assured and comfortable buying your used LV through one of these sellers.

Why?

Well, two reasons really.

Firstly, many of the resellers who have earned this level treat their selling and buying as a business. To sell a fake would result in their being stripped of their titles which could seriously affect their turnover! They only deal in authentic items and HATE fakes.

Secondly, both of the bodies who issue these distinctions have an interest and a duty in ensuring that their members behave and sell properly.

Should a buyer have an issue with one of these sellers they can take their complaint to either MyPoupette or ALVA and ask that they intervene. Although neither of these bodies are legally responsible for your sales and purchases with their listed resellers, they do take any complaint seriously and will investigate and assist where possible.

On past record, when you deal with a seller with either of these titles you are going to have a good time!

And that means you avoid buying a fake LV on eBay!

Rufus Steele is the author and creator of the Louis Vuitton website, a site dedicated to all things Louis Vuitton