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Comment by bserge | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why people hate on eBay, it's a better platform for buying (and selling) if you're at least a little careful.

Amazon's first choices are always garbage, have to sort through a lot of it, make sure you're buying from the right seller (and even then you could get a fake) and actually read the reviews (1 star, 2-3 stars and 5 stars, preferably) so you know what you're buying. But overall, it's alright.

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While I go to eBay for items I can't find on Amazon, Amazon is my go to place because they will precalculate and precharge "import fees deposit", which covers both customs tax and VAT, and will not double charge VAT on me (I am in a non-EU European country). This also helps avoid "customs processing" fee some couriers charge locally (at 30€ for DHL or 40€ for FedEx, fast shipping smaller, cheaper items balloons quite quickly: UPS has at least stopped charging this lately).

I've really been converted back to eBay. I mostly buy stuff for doing product prototyping, and it's way easier to get materials and light industrial type stuff off of eBay.

Ebay is pretty good. But I wish their filtering options where even more sophisticated. For example, as in living in the EU it would be helpful to see listings only from the EU (no need to worry about customs clearance then).

I think that option does exist, showing only items located in country, eu or world

I don't have this option. I have to select all EU countries if I want to filter. Helps with my geography knowledge, though.

I wish Ebay had the same interface as https://reverb.com/ , which is nice, but is for music-instruments only and the prices are a bit too high.

The best filtering system I know of is https://www.prisjakt.nu/ (only in Swedish though)

The option I see says Europe, which would include European countries that are not part of the EU (e.g. UK), so customs clearance would still be needed. It helps, but it's not granular enough for this particular case.

eBay.de now got that. They took a while (e.g. temporarily the adjusted it to "EU & UK", instead of taking UK out of the filter), but now it has a filter for European Union. But the various country-variants of eBay are somewhat separate, so in other countries you might see different UI.

I also think eBay's better for the cheap AliExpress stuff. Simple geographical filter gives me UK-based stock that won't take long to arrive (which AliExpresss often doesn't have), and what's left is cheaper than Amazon as well as quicker to sort through, with reliable sellers.

eBay cleaned up its act and cracked down on shady sellers. Amazon did the exact opposite, and is now worse than eBay was as it worst.

The Amazon model makes a lot more sense to me: compare products, and then either just buy it or narrow in on a seller.

eBay forces me to simultaneously compare different products across different sellers. It's a nightmare to keep track of the differences and pros/cons of each listing.

eBay's product search is also miles better than Amazon's.

I really don't know what happened to Amazon's product search, but it's almost entirely useless unless you search something super specific, and even then Google will actually give you better results.

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