Greetings, Always use Caution with Ebay or any online transaction. Ebay is the most popular online trading place, so it brings more of the bad, because of the good. Use good common sense to tell the difference between the two. Before purchasing anything Research Seller feedback, less then 10 is scarry even if the deals seem too good to be true. Because, they probably are too good to be true. No reserve items are tempting but make sure to do the homework, read the auction completely, make sure you know what is included and what is not included. Lots of sellers break up items, like cordless power tools, and sell the batteries, and chargers seperately. We seperate items also, its just a fact of Ebay. Just know what you are bidding on and what condition it is in. If the photo's are bad or not enough photo's and the item is used, STAY AWAY! If the items are Brand New, then the seller should not have lots of negative feedbacks even if they have thousands of positive feedbacks. Having so many negative feedbacks is just a tell tale of sellers who are hiding the real condition of there items. They may hid the fact that the items are factory reconditioned in stead of New. Also, Does the seller offer a phone number? Just in case you are feeling queezy about bidding, a phone number can help put you at ease. You do not want to buy from a seller who is going to hide after the money is received. And chasing after a bad seller for $100 or so is not worth it, but i dont know anyone who wants to just throw away there money. Anyway, I have been on Ebay for about 10 years now. Just wanted to share a little of my experience. I could go on and tell you a couple of stories about getting ripped of as a buyer and as a seller. Well ok I will share 2 of my best. First as a buyer. I had just opened up a small Contractor supply store with Dewalt as our main Brand. We started selling Dewalt Emglo Compressors, I was a buyer on Ebay and started comparing my distributor costs with prices on Ebay and found a couple of Large 8hp gas $1200 compressors with no reserve, i was watching them close. The seller had 35 feedbacks all positive all as a buyer so i had a little caution, but went for it anyway. I bought the compressor for about $600. What i thought was an incredible deal (thought i stole it), paid with paypal using my credit card. The product never arrived, when i emailed the seller he said he got delayed and was getting it ready for shipping. after 2-1/2 weeks he was still responding to emails but not providing tracking information. I got his personal information from Ebay and called the number in his information. It was all fake. I disputed my payment thru paypal and just slid in under the deadline for filing a dispute. I found a number and called Ebay and when they checked on everything he got kicked off ebay and i got my money back minus a $50 processing fee. I was lucky to get most of my money back. Lesson, check out if the feedback if for selling or buying. If the deal looks too good it just might be. I think this guy was going for the con that if he had good feedback and only one negative, he could continue cheating people on big items and pad his feedback with a lot of small purchases. I wasted a lot of time and $50 also. It took Paypal another 6 weeks before crediting my account after filing the dispute. OK. Just one more. This one was as a seller. This was a couple of years after that experience, so i was smarter or so i thought. I get a call to our store, we put our phone number in our ads so if any one needs us we can be contacted. The call is brokered. Sounds weird right. The call is from an internet line. The person types and the broker reads the messages to us, we respond and the broker types the messages back to the other person. CAUTION!!! Get off the phone right away!!! These people are from Africa and going to cheat you! Listen to this!!! The buyer want to buy some DW718 new Dewalt Compound Sliding miter saws. retail price $649.00 each. anyway we bought 100 of them at one time and got a great deal. so we sold him 3 of them for $1500 plus shipping. The buyer agreed and wanted to pay with a CC over the phone. OK i would save some money on fees and the buyer was ok with that. After about 3 Declined CC's i was getting suspicious. He would call back later with a CC that would accept the charge. Then we would negotiate the shipping later. That was a little weird more red flags are going up. A buyer that is happy to get me the money and does not care when i ship the product??? Not normal. We ship with fedex at the time, the seller wants it shipped with UPS just a preferance. that just seemed normal, someone with a preference that should not matter to anyone else but them, but we work with our buyers to try to accomodate, so this seems normal. After a couple of days the buyer want to email us the UPS shipping labels and all we have to do is put them on the packages and he will pay for the shipping. This was the first and last time this will ever happen. we got the shipping labels, put them on the boxes and the UPS driver pulled up within 10 min of printing the labels. So we put them on in a hurry only to realize the labels were for overnight shipping??? Miter Saws overnight overseas??? That must cost as fortune, right. The con artist buyer opened up a UPS account in our name from Texas, we are in Florida. Long story short, The packages got shipped, the payment got declined because the CC was stolen. The UPS legal dept contact us and wanted us to pay the bill or get sued for the give or take $1601.00 for shipping charges. We refused to pay and explained if they would find out who received the product we would be glad to fly over there and retreive our product and get the extra money from the thief who stole our product and opened the UPS account for our business. After sending all of the emails to the UPS attourneys they did not pursue us further, and now we ship all our products with UPS (as of 1-7-2007). Moral of that story, Always use Ebay with CAUTION! I hope this was helpful, Bishop Supply, Auction_4_Fun.