Anyway, I just wanted to kind of give an overview of how useful this actually can be. If you really have something you enjoy doing and are good at, you can make a lot of money if you know the right places to sell.

The main thing to remember is that you want to have a dedicated niche community that you communicate with. In my instance, I have some coin forums I go on. Buying on ebay for a lot of people is stressful, hazardous, and really a lot like swimming with the sharks, so often they'd rather buy from you at a decent/good price than go risk a lot of shit on ebay, especially with expensive things.

Obviously you can get screwed too, but not if you know what you're doing...

1. Make sure the seller has a return policy if it is something expensive. If there is none, try to negotiate one over email. Be careful that they are not an outright scammer though, or they could still screw you over. Often if there is no outright return policy (many sellers just forget), other buyers will be turned off, but you will have an edge.

2. Ask for pictures if unsure. Especially in the last 24 hours, when they can't post more in the auction, giving you an edge. However, the downside to that is that sometimes they will not respond in time.

3. Avoid combative sellers that are threatened by the idea of a return policy. Usually they have something to hide or are just a pain in the ass to deal with.

4. Buy from sellers mostly with 50-5000 feedbacks, not 50000 or 100000 feedbacks. The latter often are over-hyped, featured, and you won't get very good deals most of the time because people will over-bid. They also will often have poor customer service because their volume is just too high. At first, you might want to avoid buying from people with really really low feedback like 5 (though later, you can if you feel comfortable with doing so), because they can be unreliable. I find that the sweet spot is around 100-300 feedbacks, because these tend to not really be high profile, but list a fair amount of items.

5. 99.9% feedback means nothing. Often people used to leave positives since sellers could retaliate, and often they just leave false positives. Dishonest sellers also use smurf accounts to bump up their rating. Check their negatives/neutrals on toolhaus.org before buying something expensive.

6. When in doubt, don't buy. You might regret not winning, but you will be WAY more ticked off if you get screwed, trust me.

7. Don't be afraid to return an item, and MAKE SURE you send it back insured if it is expensive or you don't know the seller.  

8. Don't always ignore buy it nows or starting prices that are above $1. Often people will instinctively ignore them, even if they are substantially below value. For instance, if an item starts at $59.99, and is worth $180, you can often win it for $100.

9. Don't buy rare things from sellers in China....

10. Look for subtle defects, since most of the more obvious scams/schemes have already been done to death.

And as a footnote, 'too good to be true' deals are usually BS, but you can win certain things at 25-50% of value (even more expensive ones) if you play your cards right. This includes bidding when people aren't on much.

There is more that I can add later, if you're interested. I've found buying on ebay and selling in communities (and sometimes ebay) to be a really nice experience, if you know what you're doing. But I would definitely suggest starting small at first, as getting screwed out of $10 is way better than getting screwed out of $500.