For all those who already bought something through eBay...

[MrWho]

... what~is your general opinion? I want to spend some money on used Amiga stuff, but I'm a little afraid of buying through eBay.~For all those who purchased stuff through eBay, which one applies to you:

- Are 100% satisfied;
- Had the ocasional trouble, but recommend it nonetheless;
- Some good things, some bad things;
- Had more trouble than success;
- Never again!

Besides that, when buying from the US (I'm in Europe), how much can I expect to pay for postage?

[Eco]

I've only bought two Amiga items on Ebay, those deals worked out all right. I would imagine that the seller rating is a very good guide as to the reliability of the seller, as well as the general quality of the auction page.

The only beef I currently have with Ebay is that I often lose items because someone outbids me on the last minute, but that's just my fault for not bidding high enough.

I think that it is the quality of the people, not the channel for dealing with them, that determines whether you will be happy with your trades. Amiga owners are generally a very reliable and accomodating lot, but unfortunately there are a few bad sectors on our otherwise healthy and validated disk  :-D

[smace]

I agree with Eco. I think the seller rating gives you an idea of the seller. Be sure to check out the feedback on him/her also!

[TjLaZer]

I have done a lot of buying on eBay for Atari and Commodore items.  I have had extremely good experiences!  All sellers were very friendly and pleasant to deal with.  The only things to watch out for are over bidding on items and to make sure the seller does a good job on packing.  I recently had a monitor cracked because the seller did not pack it very well, and they also used UPS.  Two mistakes. lol I also have had a problem with sellers packing boxed games in padded envelopes or paper wrapping and the game arriving smashed.  So make sure and ask to have extra care to ship the items.

[redrumloa]

Ebay is absolutely the best market, and truth be told the ONLY living market for Amiga stuff out there. As others have already mentioned just take a few precautionary steps before buying from a seller.

1) How long has the seller been registered? Be very, very careful of recently registered sellers with no record.
2) How many positive feedbacks from buyers? If the seller only has a couple feedback, see what it was for. Be careful if they only have a couple feedback for low ticket items.
3) Any negative feedback? Negative feedback is sometimes unavoidable even with the best of intentions. You can't please everyone, and some people don't give sellers a chance to rectify a percieved problem. Be careful of a long time seller who has below ~98% overall positive. Read the specific negative coments. If you see a trend, beware.
4) Ask any and all questions BEFORE bidding. Make sure you know upfront the total shipping costs and/or applicable taxes.

If the seller has been registered a while and has a good overall feedback rating with alot of activity, chances are you will be very pleased. eBay is a wonderful place!

[weirdami]

@MrWho

What stuff are you looking for?

[MrWho]

Right now and most important, I was looking for a device to connect my Amiga to a regular TV (pardon me for not knowing specific names, but my knowledge of amiga was only limited to playing lots of games several years ago  :-) ).

Then, as money permits, I was thinking of expanding it with an HD and maybe even connect it to a regular 17'' PC monitor.

Besides that, I don't know! What are my possibilities with an A500?

[odin]

I haven't had any major problems with EBay yet *knocks on wood*. I only once bought a PC analog joystick which I received damaged. However it was only ~15EUR, so no big loss there. For small, not too valuable items I wholeheartedly can recommend EBay. I'm not too sure if I would buy items worth more than say 100EUR from EBay.

[Van_M]

...then you are looking for a "TV MODULATOR". They show up at ebay quite oftenly and they sell for cheap. Regarding the hard-disk expansion... it might be a bit tricky to find a A500 hard disk at ebay. They are quite rare nowadays. I would suggest you buy an A600 or A1200. They have built-in modulator and they accept a laptop hard drive internally. Just make sure the drive is smaller than 2 gigabyte or otherwise your workbench (or is it the kickstart?) will not recognise it. The best choice is the A1200 anyways. You can also find a cheap (> $80) accelerator for it too.

[TjLaZer]

I have 477 Pos and 5 negatives and all are bull crap.  So my rating is at 98.9%  You can't look at the overall rating alone.  There are a lot of idiots on eBay so beware.  Sometimes you cannot avoid getting a negative.  And if I get one for a BS reason, I share the favor in return!!  But for the most part I have NEVER had a problem with a Amiga/Atari transaction.  It's the other ones that I had a problem with!  So this means that Amiga/Atari people are descent/good people to deal with on eBay.  This is my own experience though.  As others have pointed out, I would be cautious on little or no feedbacks.  Also try to contact the seller to see how their communication is.  Nothing worse than a rude or careless seller.

[jeffimix]

thought that was 4gigs... mine has 3gig, although it's a 2000.... the 500 does nice TV greyscale...

[BIG-IRON]

I have nothing but good to say about ebay. If you are smart and look at the persons feedback you wont most likely get the boot to the head.

[Daedalus]

Yes, it's 4GB, but the boot partition has to be entirely within the first 2 Gigs IIRC if you're not to have problems, as it must be able to read it with the filesystem in the Kickstart ROMs before any updates or patches are installed. However, If you're still using KS1.3 you'll have problems with partitions that size anyway, OFS has a much smaller limit (of the order of <1GB) so you may want to look at upgrading to a 1200 or upgrading your kickstart.