Sold laptop to new ebay user -- how to protect seller?

cyberbob

peter_the_piper wrote: »

You forgot the deterrent effect of mentioning the marking. Whereas a professional scammer would not be put off it should reduce the opportunist ones. Gotta agree with the rest of the post though.

The problem I see with mentioning marking is you can put off real buyers who don't actually understand what it is. Also its easily removable. I bought a Laptop a few months ago to refurbish.

It had security markings on (I check all my purchases) The post code was different to who I bought it off. So I checked with that Post code and they had sold it on. Anyway to remove those security markings is incredibly easy. Even if you don't know just look in a search engine and it'll tell you. Also as above people sell stuff on sometimes its marked sometimes its not. I suppose you don't have much to lose by mentioning it

Most opportunistic scammers I believe are put off if they see a very well put together listing by someone who obviously knows what they are doing. Opportunistic scammers seem to go for the listings that have little feedback and say things like Apple powerbook for sale- used 2 years old (with no details or specifics) and the listing has one poor picture.

Most scammers whether opportunistic or professional will go for the easier ones (why make your job difficult) and its sad to say there are a lot of easy targets on ebay. Not only are they easy targets if they manage to avoid the scammers there items are not getting the value they could. This is actually quite good for me as I can pick items up for a lot less do a little work and get a very healthy profit.

A lot of these problems could be avoided with some basic research. But ebays advertising has been too good with there claims on how easy it is to sell. So generaly people are lazy so they will list with no research and when they come a cropper then suddenly start looking into it when its all to late and they have lost a lot of money.

Ebay want to keep it simple for people to list (as thats there income) but i'm sure if they did something basic like make the help pages actually make sense it would make it a lot easier for new sellers