Fancy getting items you can't locate at your local stores? Want to get something cheaper than what it seems to be in the market? Or, do you want to get rid of items that is too new/valuable to discard?
Look no further, eBay is the place to go.
Set up in the 90s, this online bidding platform had millions of transaction going on daily. Just take a look at the menu bar of the website. They have books, collectables, coins, computers, clothes, shoes, electronics, entertainment, soft toys, health and beauty, jewellery, watches, mobile phones, pet supplies, sports, toys, hobbies and even real estate!
Wow. If you have not tried purchasing anything from ebay, i must say you are losing out on an extremely exciting online shopping center. If you want to look for an item quickly, just type some key words in the search bar. For eg, you want to find a casio watch, just type "casio watch" and the website will return many results for casio watches. You can rank them according to the price, from lowest to highest, item end time or by the condition: used or new.
You can select the format of the search, such as buy it now or auction. If you want to narrow it down to just the local market, you may also select "Singapore only." This is useful if you do not currently own a credit card. If you have a credit card, i would suggest that you sign up for payment under paypal. Just like any other credit card transaction, paypal is a middleman who helps you to make payment under your credit card. It is a safe platform to pay your overseas vendor.
When you use paypal for payment, you have the right to open a transaction dispute if your items failed to reach you. Paypal might even offer a full refund if their investigation shows the seller indeed had not delivered or parcel gets lost in transition.
So, you might see that some auction end time could be in the midnite where everyone is sleeping, so how can we bid? Do we give our best amount and go to sleep hoping we will win the bid? Well, i used to do that, having lost many of the bids along the way. Until i found this website call gixen. Gixen is another agent who helps ebayers bid on their behalf anytime. All you need to do is to log in through your normal ebay ID and password, upon entering the page, you need to key in the "Item number" and also your maximum bid amount. Then, go to sleep and wake up to check if you are the lucky winner.
The advantage of using gixen is they will only bid during the last 5 seconds of the transaction, hence the chance of other bidders overtake you along the way. However, if you max is lower than the rest, you will still lose. Having said that, do take note that some other bidders might also be using this to snip the items, so all the best!
I started out using ebay because i wanted to get rare disney items which is not found anywhere in Singapore. Yes, i love Dumbo the elephant, but i cant find many of his items in Sg, maybe its because he is not so popular here. It seemed that Mickey and the rest and everywhere, so poor Dumbo elephant have no place here. After getting many Dumbo items online, i started to get other items which i always wanted as a kid, such as my mini empire series of collectables.
Warning, eBay is a highly addictive online shopping center. It is as effective as smoking, many had spent thousands or maybe more each month on online shopping. If you feel you have to stop, stop immediately. Or call the Quit-shopping hotline.