I've been buying stuff on Ebay since 1996, and I only once ran into a fraudulent seller, and that was in 1998; I managed to track down his home address and phon

I've been buying stuff on Ebay since 1996, and I only once ran into a fraudulent seller, and that was in 1998; I managed to track down his home address and phone number, and called and talked to his parents, who promptly straightened it all out. (It was some stupid teenager "selling" stuff and never shipping it.) What I do see these days is counterfeit stuff. It's really easy to avoid this stuff though: there's a checkbox on the left that lets you filter results to show only US sellers or North American sellers. Filter out the Chinese sellers and the counterfeit stuff goes away. I've never had a big problem with late shipping, but if you're the type who demands stuff ASAP I can see how you'd be unhappy. The big thing you can do on Ebay is be careful who you buy from and look at the feedbacks. Huge-volume sellers with good feedback are usually pretty safe, and ship quickly. Low-volume occasional sellers with 100% feedback are safe. Foreign sellers with spotty feedback are to be avoided unless it's something really cheap and you're willing to take a gamble on it being junk (if it doesn't show up at all, Ebay will refund your money). It's really not that different from Amazon in this regard, since so much stuff on Amazon is sold by "affiliates", a bunch of whom are Chinese sellers, or otherwise independent companies that ship themselves rather than outsourcing that to Amazon.