Safe audiogon transactions; lowering the bar.

I've done few transactions on a-gon but have bought tons of stuff on ebay. Certainly the culture there is that the seller is entitled to call all the shots. Some sellers burden you with screen after screen of their personal rules and regulations. Don't do business with these people. Without exception, I have found them rigid, demanding, and extremely hard to work with. One seller went out of his way to bomb me with negative feedback because I didn't immediately answer his emails when I was, in fact, in the very act of burying my mother!

Tell the seller that you will deal one and only one way: COD. Period. Negotiate on a deposit to cover shipping if that is a high-cost issue. NEVER send the money in advance. If the seller wants to make the sale, he'll let FedEx collect the payment. If not, bye-bye, there'll be another one for sale soon.

Driver, I understand your point of view but I cannot agree. The refusal of a seller to accept COD payment is, to me, a much larger red flag than my insistence that it be the means of payment.

COD has some disadvantages and, yes, fraud is possible. But by and large all it does is to level the playing field, which is ordinarily very much tilted in favor of the seller. It assures that money and goods change hands at the same time; that is the most important part. Beyond that:

(1) It gets sellers off their bottoms and down to the shipper with the goods. I have consistently found that COD transactions are shipped faster than prepaid ones.
(2) It assures a quality job of packing and labeling. When I make clear to the seller that I will NOT accept a damaged parcel, the seller understands better his responsibility to pack carefully and securely. I'm sorry, sellers, but pushing the responsibility for safe arrival off on the carrier is a cop-out. We all know how UPS and FedEx handle their parcels and they aren't going to change because MY parcel happens to contain a Levinson amp. So it is incumbent upon the seller to pack defensively. If he knows that failure to do so will result in (a) no money and (b) the return of the goods for HIM to fight with UPS about, the quality of the packaging goes way up. I always make clear that I will pay for quality packaging and I never balk at packing charges that are anything like reasonable.

This is a personal choice. I have had some sellers accuse me of being unreasonable and others tell me to take it or leave it on their terms. I invariably leave it and I've never been sorry to do so.

As always, YMMV!

Will

Thanks for your comments, Driver. I agree that a phone call or two is extremely useful. Also, when a seller feels awkward about COD, I always offer to pay a non-refundable deposit equal to the shipping and insurance. That means that the most that the seller can lose is the time that the equipment is away from home....

I've heard--perhaps someone here can confirm or deny--that ebay gets 2-3 times as many complaints from buyers as they do from sellers. I mean SERIOUS complaints, not junk about how someone took 24 hours to reply to an email or oh my God there was a fly speck on page 48 of manual and the seller didn't tell me.

Interesting point of view, Bill, in that you detail all the steps you take to protect yourself from uscrupulous buyers yet bristle at the idea that buyers might desire to protect themselves from unscrupulous sellers, as well.

This isn't about paranoia, it is about playing on a level field. I'm dubious about sellers who say "trust me" but obviously don't trust their customers.

Lakefrontroad, I'm not sure what the point is in your ad hominem argument. As to my negative feedback on ebay, I make no secret of it, or the reason for it. In fact, I made that reason clear a while back.

Email me privately, if you're interested, and I'll fill you in. In the meantime, attack my arguments if you like but don't attack me.

Fondly,

Will