How to get Ebay to confirm a listing is legitimate??

Question

Want to buy an item that is so far below market that I wonder if its a scam. How can I get Ebay to confirm it is legitimate or to protect against scam if it doesn't arrive as advertised??

eburtonlab · Answer

@jvc_81

eBay has no idea which listings are legitimate and which are not. Except for a handful of items that go through third-party authentication, eBay never sees what the seller ships or what the buyer receives. So eBay has no idea whether sellers actually have on hand the items they advertise.

Items that are listed well below market prices are often used as bait for scams, particularly when there are other obvious red flags, such as the seller having no feedback from actual users for selling similar items before, or sellers being registered in one location but claiming to ship from another.

In general, you can avoid a lot of headaches by choosing to purchase only from established sellers that have recent and past positive feedback as a seller for selling items in the same category that you intend to buy. If someone is selling a dozen apple watches, but has no feedback, or only has feedback as a buyer, or only has feedback for selling dress patterns or fishing lures (actual examples I have seen), perhaps wait until they have a track record of positive feedback for selling electronics before you buy from them.

You might miss out on a good deal from a new seller once in a while, and nothing can guarantee that you won't still run into an issue anyway, but you can avoid a lot of potential problems by choosing to do business with established sellers. Anyone can put together a listing that looks nice -- it is not hard at all to simply copy an existing listing -- but it is much harder to create a history of consistent sales and positive feedback.

For more experienced sellers, you can learn a lot about the sort of seller you are dealing with by checking the seller's feedback page to see where the seller is registered and to notice if the seller has any negative feedback. If you see negatives indicated in the table of recent feedback, you can choose to exclusively see each type of comment by clicking on the numbers shown in the table. Reading negative or neutral comments can often tell you if a seller has a pattern of problems with items not matching the descriptions, canceled orders, late deliveries or item location misrepresentation.

If a seller has a pattern of too many serious negatives -- or just not enough positive history -- it is often better to find another seller with a better track record to do business with.