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Over the past 3 years dealing on eBay I have had dealings with a variety of both Sellers and Buyers. Ranging from excellent to the very dodgy. I would say on the whole 99 per cent of both buyers and sellers are honest and genuine, but as with everything there is also the 1 percent you need to steer clear of.

I decided to purchase a White Gold Diamond Ring. I did the search found lots of rings and decided which one I liked the look of, the picture was good, the description looked fine, then although the sellers feedback was not high, I thought it's not that bad and the price was cheap. I won the ring paid via Paypal and waited for the ring to arrive. Just before the ring arrived I had an email from another buyer, who had received a similar ring and told me that it was a fake, the ring was silver with a paste stone and retailed in a high street shop for £2.99 and the seller had tried to file the 925 silver mark from the ring. My ring arrived and was obviously a fake. We then contacted all other buyers including a person from the USA who had won 2 for a lot of money, luckily she had not paid. We contacted the seller who was abusive and said it was as described, so we reported the seller to both eBay and Paypal. The end result was, we received our money back and the seller was booted off eBay. The only downside, the seller was able to leave me negative feedback even though they were selling fake rings and once posted it will not be removed, which I still think is unfair.

Sometimes however it does pay to take a bit of a chance. I was looking at rings and came across an item with a fairly basic description and a blurry out of focus picture. Deciding to risk a few pounds on the item, I worked out how much I could afford to pay and even if it wasn't that good I should still at least be able to get my money back on resale, I placed my bid. A few days later the ring arrived and I was surprised that it looked excellent, very heavy gold and what looked like diamonds and sapphire. I left my positive feedback to the seller and took the ring to my local jewellers for a valuation. I was surprised when I went to collect it, the valuation said the ring was indeed diamonds and sapphire. It was also worth £1,600 I had paid less than 10 per cent of this price and resold the ring a few weeks later for a good profit. It sometimes pays to take a chance but be prepared to make mistakes !!!. It is possible to make a good living buying badly listed items and reselling them.

Another thing I have had varying degrees of standards with is the packaging of the items I bought on eBay.

I purchased a Royal Doulton figure. On receiving the package from the postman it was rattling, which was not a good sign. I took the brown paper off and underneath was the original box the figure came in, which was very thin cardboard. I opened the box and inside was some tissue paper and a very broken figure.

I contacted the seller and told him the figure was broken and that the packaging was the problem and he was very apologetic and gave me a full refund.

Other items I have bought have been packaged to such a standard that its taken me 10 minutes to break into the packaging to get the item out. I once received a shoe box size package and couldn't work out what was inside as I had bought nothing that size recently to find a very small Vinaigrette inside surrounded by masses of bubble wrap and tissue paper.