Net Results: It's a lonely place to be, but sometimes I feel that I must be the last person on the planet who hasn't either bought or sold something on eBay, writes Karlin Lillington
It's not that I haven't been tempted by some of the stories of fabulous items bought, or the large sums pocketed by relatives and friends who have sold their former "junk" on the auction site.
I've a cousin who, while renovating his 150-year-old house, found an old-style gramophone stored in a dark corner of the attic. He was going to sell it for $50 (€41) in the local paper, but decided to put it on eBay "just for fun". About $700 later, he was a convert to the joys of eBay.
Now my mother has that tell-tale eBay glint in her eye, which is similar to the old-style car boot sale glint, but with the extra intensity only a PayPal online instant money transfer account brings.
Lately, she has been bugging me to explain to her how to put some unwanted furniture on to eBay.
So far, I have managed to fob her off, but I fear this won't be for long. Soon, my parents will discover to their mortification that, while their daughter writes about technology and the internet every week, she has not a clue how to eBay.
The shame: it is like admitting you haven't yet made the shift from wax cylinder recordings to those newfangled MP3s.
I don't know why I don't eBay. Partly it is that I don't have anything I think people would want - these days everyone has a large box of unused electronics items in the attic and I just don't think anyone wants to buy anything in mine.
Then, I have a perhaps overdeveloped degree of caution - I trust that Amazon will send me my books once I place an order, but I am not so sure about Krystal in Norwich and her Beanie Babies.
According to an article this week in the San Jose Mercury-News, however, my caution seems to be well-advised, at least if one is interested in buying certain types of items. Say, something from posh New York jewellers Tiffany and Co.
When Tiffany employees went online to purchase some of the goods purporting to be bona fide Tiffany in 2004, they found 73 per cent of their eBay purchases were fraudulent: all counterfeit goods.
They've brought a lawsuit against eBay claiming the company doesn't do enough to prevent such fraud.
As eBay makes a profit off each sale, Tiffany lawyers hope to use case law that finds landlords have some liability for fraudulent goods sold in their bricks and mortar premises - although, as eBay has pointed out, they never handle the goods, but only aid in the direct transfer between buyer and seller.
For its part, eBay also counters by noting it has 1,000 employees who search for counterfeit or otherwise fraudulent auctions on its range of international auction sites.
However, given the millions of auctions happening at any given moment on eBay, even a thousand diligent watchmen and women are a tiny army, argue some manufacturers and retailers. Take Oakley, the trendy sunglasses manufacturer. According to the Mercury-News, it went online last year and found 19,000 auctions selling fake Oakley goods.
They traced some of the sales to a man in Oregon who had more than 30,000 further pairs of counterfeit sunglasses ready to put up for auction.
Fraud experts say you often don't know you are buying a counterfeit until you receive the goods, because the image placed on an auction site will be of the real thing, while what arrives in the post is a fake - a so-called "gray market diversion".
How to tell the difference? In general, by using that old buyer beware caution that indicates anything that sounds too good to be true probably is. And keep in mind that the vast majority of auctions are totally above board.
On its Irish auction site, eBay posts guidelines on how to buy and sell safely at http://pages.ebay.ie/safetycentre/index.html.
As to the wider legal issues raised by Tiffany, its lawsuit against eBay comes up later this year, when undoubtedly it will draw plenty of attention.
Whether it will set new precedents for online buying and selling remains to be seen. In the meantime, I might go back up into the attic and see if any of those boxes of junk - I mean potential collectables - yields anything someone might want to buy on eBay.
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