Yep. When I sold my last Iphone, the guy said the wifi had connection issues (It was the version where your finger could reduce the signal). I told him that that was a known problem with the phone, but if he still had problems with it, he could take it to an apple store as the phone still had applecare+. He said the apple people are mean and he didn't trust them. He kept trying to get me to compensate him $50 for a repair until finally he ended up returning. So annoying.

Another lesson about ebay: Don't ever ship something to an address other than the one ebay has. My brother sold his phone and the guy asked him to ship it to "his daughter's house for a present". Turns out the account had been hacked and now he had just sent his phone to a scammer.

The last horror story i have: The same brother sold an iphone on ebay and the guy claimed it came with the screen cracked. Ebay sided with him on the return and my brother received a letter in return with nothing in it. Fortunately for him that time, ebay just let him keep the money and the scammer keep the phone (albeit, after 2 hours of arguing with their customer service).

TLDR: I've had way too terrible experiences on ebay to ever use them again.

I lied, i have one more minor horror story with buying too. I bought my rMBP off of ebay for a pretty good price. A few months after I bought it, it stopped booting and would show a grey screen with a question mark on a folder (means there is no boot drive to load from). When I took it into the apple store, I found out that this laptop had been dropped right before I bought it and had to have like $1500 worth of repairs as it was having the same problem.

So not only do you have to worry about scammers, you have to deal with a market for lemons [1]. (Quite ironic now that I think about it as that is one of my favorite economic articles)

[1]: https://www.iei.liu.se/nek/730g83/artiklar/1.328833/AkerlofM...

Selling on eBay only makes sense in bulk, with hundreds or thousands of SKUs. I gave up selling in low volume there long ago; nowadays for phones, tablets, and watches I use Swappa, and for anything else it's Craigslist or local "online garage sale" groups on social media.

The company I left last year sells the bulk of their products on Amazon, and maybe 1/4th of their inventory (same type of products) is listed on eBay. Amazon sales are relatively smooth with much less friction per sale than eBay. It's gotten better since they went with a sales aggregator service, but they still barely break even on eBay as opposed to Amazon and physical storefront sales, when they figure in labor and time costs. When I worked there the sales personnel were able to list five or six items on Amazon in the time it took to list one item on eBay.

They manually list items ? Is that really still done today ?

On eBay, yes, because even today eBay still requires you to photograph the actual item you're listing if it's not new and factory sealed, and a lot of their merchandise is open-box. The switch to a sales aggregator service helped, but they still have to go hands-on with the bulk of their eBay listings.

eBay really doesn't make sense for a larger business unless they have thousands of the exact same, new sealed merchandise, and that tends to be the cheap mass produced garbage that you find on wish.com and similar sites. The small to mid closeouts wholesaler doesn't have a place on the site anymore, which is why many are moving to Amazon. Unfortunately, as this article points out, scammy buyers are just as much a problem there.

I've found ebay is a great place to sell smaller, cheaper things that I probably couldn't find a buyer for on craigslist. Stuff of lower value (<$50) that I wouldn't mind losing anyway really, like an extra laptop battery or an old cell phone. For those things, it's not worth the effort to find a craigslist buyer and meet up somewhere, but tossing it into a flat rate box is very easy.

As things get more expensive on eBay, you become a bigger target for scammers and stand to lose much more, so it becomes a terrible option both because of how many scammers there are and their policy of screwing over sellers. Also the more expensive it is the more likely I'll be able to move it on craigslist which is a sure thing.

On the other hand for the odd item at less than $50 or so, I can't be bothered spending the time and effort to list on eBay. I'll just take it down to Goodwill or whatever. Not worth my time.