Ask HN: Have you bought something expensive on eBay with confidence?

Several laptops, open box iphone, rack-mount servers, high-speed scanners, hard drives, 2 9-track tape drives (yes really!), ...

You might run into an occasional problem, but sellers I've dealt with are mostly good about returns or exchanges if there is a problem.

I did buy some AMD CPU chips one time from a guy. I needed 12 to upgrade some servers but only bought 4 at first. Worked great. Then I ordered 20. I received a flat envelope in my mailbox. I thought "Hmm, that's odd, it looks empty." Instead of being smart and opening it while taking a video, I just opened it and -- it was empty. I figured it was just a shipping mistake, called the guy, and he said he shipped them (actually he had a shipping person doing the packing so they might have been the thief) and I was trying to rip him off. He ended up giving me a discount on the 12 I needed but didn't refund the 20 I didn't get. It was the only place I could get them, unfortunately.

The way I look at it, I've gotten pretty good deals on everything at eBay, so if I get a little screwed once in a while, it all averages out to be okay.

Yes. Boss asked us to get SAN / NAS gear on the cheap + other misc networking gear, all for test / dev env's to trial a new product / approach. We found some on eBay and leadership was cool with it. Forget the exact amount but final costs were in excess of something like $9k USD.

No issues with the sellers or shipping AFAIK.

Mostly successful, but one of the big 4U disk arrays had some backplane issues and was a wash; the rest worked fine. The 4U was one of the more expensive pieces, though, and shipping was non-trivial. Not really a great choice but wasn't enough of a disaster to dissuade folks from considering it.

Never personally ordered anything more than $200 off it eBay directly. There is a reason you reach out to VARs, real estate agents, etc. when things start looking expensive.

How expensive are we talking? Most of my ebay purchases are in the < $100.00 range, but I've bought some test equipment that was a couple of thousand dollars. My one Keysight logic analyzer was about $4K IIRC, but keep in mind, I bought it from the Official Keysight Used Equipment Store on Ebay, not from some random seller. The other bits of test gear though, were from more or less random individuals, and so far I've never had any issues.

I bought a timeshare for $3495 on eBay. The seller had 100% positive feedback and a history of large transactions (watch out for sellers with 1000 sales of $1 items and then an expensive one). PayPal does not allow real estate transactions but I was able to pay directly using my American Express (I was willing to pay the 3% fee). The transaction went smoothly.

How much money are you willing to blow on a night out?

That should be your limit for whatever you buy on eBay, the most fun I ever have on a night out is around $200.

Just bought a film camera, and a bunch of film. Between that and trying to get the photos developed, I probably wasted over $200, Camera never worked. Film didn't develop.

Such is life

The rule I've always followed is never buy from someone with less than 99% positive feedback.

It depends on what you're buying. Expensive jewelry, for example, is something I would never buy off eBay. High-end electronics is a maybe, but the seller would need to have close to 100% positive feedback.

2 vehicles over the years. last one was $16k? But was buying from dealerships that just had what i was after.. not a collectors car or anything. Probably more utilitarian than anything.

I bought a refurbished iPhone screen to replace my GFs broken one. Seems legit. It was a seller with a lot of good ratings though. I also bought a ThinkPad there before, which was legit.

eBay is pretty notoriously favorable to buyers in dispute resolution.

Yes, you buy the seller. In certain markets there are recognizable sellers that are known to be legit.

What's expensive? Like a laptop? Sure. Car? No. (Not that confidence would be the issue there...)