I'm not a regular ebay seller, just an occasional buyer. I have a few relatively high value items that I'd like to get rid of and ebay seems the most likely option to maximize prices. I am, however, concerned with scammers given that the situation would be high risk in that regard.
The scam that I think most likely would be a buyer claiming that what they got was not as advertised, and from what I read on these forums ebay has never really offered much in the way of protection, and that doesn't seem to have changed for years. So, I'm looking for some alternate methods and wondering if any will hold water with ebay.
Ebay now has the authentication program, but the items are quite limited. Something like this seems very ideal given that it will take very little work to look at the item and see that it is as described. I don't see any way other than this to prove that the correct item was shipped in the event of a return claim by the buyer.
So my questions:
1) Are there any third party services that would authenticate an item being sold prior to shipping, and that ebay would also take a as reliable source? Seems like a fairly simple service model, I ship it to a third party, they check and take a couple photos and then ship it to the buyer.
2) Are there any off platform insurance options that in the event the buyer claims fraud and returns an item other than the one they shipped they would reimburse (and handle any legal matters on their own)?
I know similar questions have been asked, but I haven't seen any quite like this at least recently. I understand the "don't sell anything you can't afford to lose," but I figured I would exhaust at least these two options prior to writing off ebay entirely, even though I understand that's the likely outcome.
