I buy allot of music CD's and records so I'll talk about that. I guess the best advice I can give is check out your seller. An important question is...what's this person's overall rating? One example I can give is just before Christmas I won an auction and even after a week of sending emails to the seller, I heard nothing. Well, this seller had 99.xx% positive feedback with nice comments about fast shipping and great values and so on. I kept sending out emails and finally after several weeks...yes WEEKS... I get an email saying sorry for the delay and here's the amount with shipping, etc, etc. So I log into paypal and begin to pay when an error message pops up telling me that the seller cannot receive payments. I was confused so I tried it again with the same results. I emailed the seller and sure enough...no response. I decided to check out the sellers feedback again and within two or three days just before I attempted to make the payment, this seller had a sloop of negs with comments like rip off--- no communication--- never sent me product and the like. At that point, I wasn't suprised. I was fortunate that paypal wouldn't accept my money because I would've been out $36.00. Over a period of 6 weeks I continuously emailed the seller and no response. I located the seller's phone number and I called so many times without any answer or voicemail of any kind. One time the line was busy and that's as close as I got. By the end of it all this seller's feedback rating was somewhere in the 80 percentile range... pretty lame. I've been ripped off before and luckily it wasn't much money... $5 here... $10 there. The point of this is, you can never tell how honest or how deceptive a seller is... but if you check them out you might be able to make an educated decision and if you don't have that warm fuzzy feeling, don't click the bid now or buy-it-now button. Good luck and happy bidding!