Newbie to ebay. Questions...
 

I have never purchased anything from Ebay. To be quite frank, I was always too worried to get ripped off. But now my cell phone has kind of died (no signal period) and a new phone is in order. Rather than extend my contract or pay like crazy for one off contract I was looking around on ebay and they have cheap phones that are 'new.' Has anyone gotten one of these before? Is it a scam?

This is the phone I was looking at, or something along these lines.

As long as the seller has good rep it should be cool right? There is no sim, which is fine because I can use the one from my old phone right?

Thanks!

While I don't have specific knowledge about phones on EBay, may I suggest you be very careful when looking at sellers' feedback.

If you see someone you're considering buying from, check out their username at

www.toolhaus.org

It will pull up only the negatives and neutrals the seller has received, saving you from having to scroll through pages and pages of feedback looking for their negatives. (It may take a while to load if that seller has enormous feedback volume.) Reading the negs can really give you an idea if the seller is trustworthy or if he repeatedly gets negs for certain things.

The seller you linked to may have 97.2 positive feedback, but he still has almost 500 negatives. . .

With a feedback rating of 15,844 it wouldn't be uncommon to have a large number of negatives. You can't please everybody all of the time.

I wouldn't feel comfortable buying from that seller. 61 negs in the past month is not good no matter how you look at it. Plus, that is not really an excuse to me. I have a seller in my favorites with a rating of 12,470 that has only 37 total negs. 0 from the past month. 7 in the past 6 months. It's possible to deal with a high volume of auctions without receiving an unusually high number of negative feedback.

I'd agree with the other posters. Plus, that's just an L6, the latest SLVR is L7, which adds on a microSD slot. I wouldn't get the L6 unless you are really broke and that's all you can aford. Actually, I'd probably skip the SLVR altogether. The only thing I like about my SLVR is the fact that it is so skinny, it fits nicely in my front pocket. But the feature set and interface blows, imho.

Those Negatives are definitely high. I have a 1300 with only one negative.

97% isn't a good percentage when it comes to feedback for most categories.

I wouldn't buy a cell phone on ebay partly because depending on the seller, you may or may not have a warranty (is he an authorized reseller for that brand, etc).

Thanks for the information guys. I appreciate it.