Hi, I've done both buying and selling on ebay (local and international) for a while now (recently more buying then selling
$$$ gone...)
It is generally a good place to buy stuff but as already warned by many fellow CS-ers here...make sure you buy from reputable source, by means of checking their feedbacks (and the number of feedbacks). I usually will not immediately buy from someone says have 1000 ratings and 99.4% possitive. If I am buying from this person for the first time, I will take time to read through he feedbacks, especially feedbacks left by buyers with high number of feedbacks themselves. If they have negative, I will try and read through the reasons (if you can still find those negative feedbacks, some may be way back).
When I am satisfied, than I will bid/buy. Do note that it is still a risk as you will more than likely to be transferring your money first, and for cheap items, the ebay/paypal buyer protection is not really useful. Also, be careful with sellers from certain asian countries (don't want to mention name lah) who sometimes claim to be selling genuine items, they still get good amount of positive feedbacks because most don't care but most turn out to be genuine imitation (you get what I mean).
All in all, I have a positive experience in ebay over the years with 1 failed transaction (items never arrived) out of the 286 transactions so far (with 181 unique ratings). I will sure be raising those numbers in the near future
Note: as mentioned by one of the CS-er, the paypal rate is lousier than normal exchange rate but is one of the more widely accepted way of payment in ebay. In fact, the cheapest way (coz most don't offer credit card payment) as compare to money order, western union (avoid if possible, least safe way of payment), bank draft, etc...for overseas payment.
