Considered as one of the world’s biggest online auction website, eBay is the place where you can find practically almost anything and everything you need. For sellers, you can easily sell your items here more conveniently and quickly as against community bulletin boards and newspaper listings. Sadly though, this online selling site also has some disadvantages. There are people who ended up getting scammed or ripped off by some eBay sellers who do nothing but take advantages of poor their poor buyers.
Getting Started with eBay
To use eBay, you need to register and sign in first so you can access the site.
- Go to their sign-in page. Make sure that the sign-in page or web address is https://signin.ebay.com.
- Provide your login id, email address, and your password.
- When using a shared or public computer, make sure you uncheck that “Stay Signed In” box before checking the “Sign in” button.
Protecting your Privacy and Identity
Since eBay is an online selling site, it is critically important to protect your privacy and identity, thus, the site constantly requires you to sign in periodically.
For instance, eBay will require you to login to your account when you:
- Request for a change of primary user information like your email address, your user ID, the payment methods you prefer, or your credit card information.
- When you have an existing buyer account and you wish to add your own seller account.
- When you list a specific item using a different browser, regardless if you have chosen to check the “Stay Signed In” option. But, if you are still using the same internet browser session in signing in and listing an item, you won’t be prompted to login again not unless you have completely closed your browser after you have signed in.
- If your cookies become corrupted or you have cleared them from your browser.
- You post to Answer Centers, eBay groups, or Community Discussion Boards.
Valuable Tools in eBay to Remember
Once you have already registered and logged in to eBay, there are three essential tools in this online selling site that you have to take your time into going over: the user feedbacks, the security center, and the bidding histories.
The User Feedback is where you can see the comments of previous users on all the transactions they have participated in. When users comment, they are to assign a ranking to their description; either positive, neutral or negative. Just by looking at the feedback, you can easily tell if the seller is legitimate and sells quality merchandise.
Furthermore, eBay’s Security Center is the site’s comprehensive safety protective and resource arm. Here, you can monitor the site’s users. When users log in the system, there is a server record in the site that monitors their respective internet address. However, users cannot view all these information but there are Safe Harbor personnel that respond to various complaints based from the internet address.
The bidding history is where you can find the list of other bidders who bid in the same auctions. This is a helpful way in pinpointing whether or not users are playing and abiding by the rules of eBay.