3 Reasons to avoid buying on ebay

Ebay, one of the popular ecommerce website operating in India for quite some time. After having analyzed other ecommerce websites, I have realized that buying on ebay is of more risk compared to other sites. These are the following reasons why you should avoid buying from ebay:

1.     Old and refurbished products are sold in pretext of brand new: Sellers on ebay are allowed to list old, refurbished and new items depending on the type of item. There are many sellers on ebay who list their old and refurbished products as new and give fancy description and cheap prices to grab attention of the buyers. Humble buyer would look at the price talk to the seller over phone and will get convinced and end up in buying old or refurbished product. This is true mostly in case of electronic items like mobile phones and tablets.

2.     Novice and inexperienced sellers: Anybody having an account on ebay can list a product for selling. There is no verification done to verify the authenticity of the seller. This brings in serious issues with the quality of the product. There are many new and one time sellers who list their products at cheap price just for fun. Now, if a buyer goes ahead and buys the product, the money would remain stuck with ebay with no guarantee that the seller would actually ship the item. Later, buyer has to go with pain staking process of calling in the customer care/claims to get the money back which easily takes over a month

Tax theft

3.     No Sales tax given to the government: As mentioned in the above point, anybody having an ebay account can list and sell their goods. In India, it is mandatory for a seller to register for a TIN with a local state tax body in order to sell goods. In turn, sales tax has to be deposited the seller depending on the turnover. All authentic ecommerce websites like snapdeal, flipkart, amazon etc would only register a seller if he has a valid TIN and pays taxes. However, on ebay sellers are allowed to sell their products even without a TIN and the money received from buyers is transferred to sellers Savings account. This is actually illegal. That's the reason why you find some items selling at lower price on ebay than on other sites.

Make sure to take a wise decision. End of the the it's your hard earned money!