EBay is Decadent and Depraved

– so I’m going to come out and say it: eBay is now useless, especially for selling electronics. You might be OK if you’re selling a pot-holder shaped like a monkey, but trying to put a laptop, phone, or MP3 on there or attempting to purchase any of those items is fraught with danger and idiocy.

Case in point: I tried to sell a phone that I have lying around here, fairly new model. I don’t want to send out of the country because of customs and potential fraud, and Canada is out of the country. The first guy wins the phone and he’s in Alberta. Plus I get 15 messages asking me if I’ll ship to a cousin in Nigeria or if the phone has porn on it. So I try to sell it again and what happens? I get some guy who wants me to send the thing to Lagos. So that seller fee is in the toilet. Finally, I try to sell it again and they want me to send it to Russia and they’re offering a credit card up front. Hot damn. So essentially trying to sell anything of value on there is now almost impossible.

To answer the comments below, my listings only show I will ship to the continental U.S. The buyers had “continental” addresses — even the Canadian — in eBay but later, in email, asked me to ship outside of the country. Alberta I could have done, but the rest were obvious scams. The sales look legit until you communicate with them.

EBay used to be a fun place to buy and sell cool stuff. Now it is a commercial wasteland full of scammers and fools. I still grab a few watches from there every once in a while but I think I’ll just Craigslist stuff in the future.