I’ve bought some books, compact discs and DVDs from private sellers through Amazon, and the experience has been positive, which is why I’m leaning towards them, over Google, with whom I have no trading history at all. Wonder how it actually works, though. I’ve read that Amazon cover postage costs, but how and when? I seem to recall receiving my items in special, ‘amazon’-marked packaging, how does that work? The only negative aspect I’ve read about are supposedly draconian refund policies, should I really be worried about something like that?
As for Google, I regularly use the main search engine to look up the value of various objects via ‘item description/name + £/$/€’ searches, but don’t recall getting any concrete results in the way of used items of that type for sale. Do people even expect to get those kind of results from Google? Because if they don’t, that would nullify the presumed advantage of listing merchandise through them, wouldn’t it? Might as well just put up a regular ‘stuff for sale’ web page, that’ll show up in searches.
When I’m looking for something, I usually try eBay first, then a bunch of different Amazon sites. (That’s one reservation I have about Amazon, search results seem to be very country-specific; if I really want the best price on some item (or find one at all, if it’s something rare), I have to check on three or four different sites.) The last place I’d look would be specialist internet book or record dealers, but there I routinely see items listed for 4-5x the price they might fetch on eBay, does anyone buy from those places, at all?
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