The problem with Ebay is the shipping price of the items is not usually set. If you bid on an item and get it for a low price, you still might have to an exorbitant amount for shipping. Example: I bought a Trivial Pursuit game for $3 (a great deal). Yet I still had to pay $10 for shipping. The seller said it would be anywhere from $7 to $12. I certainly didn’t necessarily expect to pay more on the upper limit of shipping.
Half.com is better (also owned by Ebay). The shipping is set. And it is pretty reasonable. Plus usually you have multiple sellers to choose from. I haven’t tried Half. However I might try it in the future. I like it that you don’t necessarily give out financial information to the seller. Instead Half.com acts as a go between seller and buyer.
I have been told that Ebay is good for buying college textbooks on. I’m sure its a good idea. We didn’t have Ebay when I was in college. Instead I operated a email distribution list which would hook up sellers and buyers. It was on a much smaller scale, but seemed to work ok.
That’s the problem with college textbooks. They come out with a new edition each year. Just change a few words and call it a new edition. And you usually don’t know if you absolutely have to have the textbook. Many classes only occassionally referenced it, while the majority of tests were taken from the professor’s lectures. It was crazy.
I remember being forced to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal in college. When you bought a new edition of our economics book, you’d get a free subscription to the WSJ. Our professor strongly encouraged us to subscribe. I didn’t care for it, mainly because it was a daily paper which I never actually read. And it would be stuck in my campus mailbox each and every weekday. After a few weeks of class, I finally subscribed to it after being goaded by my professor. Thinking that anything in the WSJ was prime test material…. Yet I don’t recall anything about the WSJ being on the tests.