ebay🫤: tips for buying quality electronic parts at a fair price.
a compilation of tips on how to improve your buying experience and get your best buy on ebay.there is likely more ways to use eBay more successfully but these have been useful for me.😀
If you think of any tips or strategies I missed,please comment😃
All good advice.
Some of the best deals I found were either from small garage/house clearances where items were not well known to the seller, or from engineers/hams who do know the items but mainly want to clear stuff for some reason or other (moving house/country, whatever). I’d say some of the best items were from engineers in a hurry because the stuff was normally good quality and no surprising defects.
The worst deals as you say are from shops specialising in reselling electronics or with large stocks of NOS stuff where they have a just enough idea of what the items are to set a stupid high price + ONO. The worst examples include some university/lab/mil surplus resellers, sticking insane prices on commercially obsolete equipment based on the name of the manufacturer or high chance of parts scarcity – but kit that is clearly destroyed, in pieces or or with critical parts missing. These kinds of listings often have minimum information on the item or its condition, blurry or strange photo angles which don’t show the model no. or specification labels (or critical surfaces which might be damaged and mean a write-off), but do have endless pages of rules about shipping restrictions, time limits and no returns 🙂 The listing text will often use 3 or more badly chosen colours for extra win.
There are ways to still get deals from time to time on these kinds of listing but it involves a crapload of research, cross-reference and a lot of luck. I’d say 25% success rate on these even if you know what you’re doing.
Toshiba transistors anyone??? Just one example of many fake Chinesium pieces of JUNK! Thanks for the buying tips!!!