What’s the worst thing you’ve ever bought / sold on ebay?

Bought: Universal remote control for 99p – it never worked
Sold: Pair of MTB forks for £70 – they were completely knackered and I’d only expected to get £10-£15 for them

I sold a 3litre s3 lwb land rover to a bloke from Belgium.

I think it cost him more in fuel to drive it home than he paid me for it…

a set of ping golf clubs I bought on a whim for £250. Nowt wrong with the clubs really I just hadn’t realised how mind numbingly dull playing golf was….

Cheeze I’ve sold some toot on Ebay! 😆

I sell knackered or redundant scientific equipment on Ebay. Things like geiger counter type things, or electronic things what I have no idea what they do. Utter junk most of it. I have no idea why people would want them.

S’all pure profit though. All of it.

Never bought owt crap off there, but a mate of mine is a fool and buys stuff he thinks will be worth loads in years to come. It won’t. He paid £3 for a crappily printed ‘million pound note’. Like, WTF? Idiot.

My shed.

Only wanted a fiver and more importantly the guy to take it away. It sold for £130 (5′ x 7′) and the guy drove 60 miles to collect!

I sold a 2003 enduro for 760gbp, it was 3 years old & I only paid 850 for it 3yrs earlier and brand new.
The guy drove from fife to bedfordshire to collect.

I reckon he could have got a new one for what he spent…

I bought a crocodile nut cracker!!

best thing I sold was a car – got 1k over book price 😉

plus saved a few quid on not having a part ex against new car.

elf,

I love scientific instruments, what do you have for sale just now?

My old man makes some decent wedge on there selling collectables and antiques, been at if for years. Some people will spend silly money for – 100 quid postage on my old cannon ball to America, which is where it had come from 10 years previously when we lived in Canada.

78 quid for a paper milk bottle lid.

125 quid for a speaker drver that was too heavy to pick up by one person, shipped to Japan, can’t remember what the shipping was now, but extorionate and the guy bought more stuff later.

best thing – sold a road bike that was being skipped. got £70 for it.All I did was sprayed the frame down with mucoff and brillo padded the rims!

Worst – Winning a bargain Blu-Ray player, only to find out afterwards that they’d decided not to sell it.

Once bought a (broken!) old Scott full-sus frame and got shafted when the seller offered to sell me some extra bits to go with it (front mech, cranks, BB, etc.). BB when it turned up was nothing but an axle! No cups, bearings, nothing. Cranks were ST and tapers were rounded.

It was fun to ride though, eventually sold it on again for more or less what I paid.

I used to sell watch catalogues, ie: Breiltling, TAG, Jaeger etc., the type you could get free from a Jeweller. Best price I got was £41 for a Breitling one, also got great feedback for it too.. 😉

Worst thing I sold? Could be one of many things… Having to sell my old BMW 540i broke my heart, it was pretty much my dream car and it was immaculate, but as I had been made redundant I couldn’t afford to run it any more, so it had to go… Still, sold it for £60 more than I paid for it though!

Then there’s the Thule roofbars off said car… Bought them brand new, paid about £70 or so… Used them literally twice, got about £1.50 for them!!! Swings and roundabouts I suppose…

Also the spare set of wheels I bought for the car… Basically, same as the original wheels, but they had good tyres on. Paid £140 for the set of 4 wheels, didn’t even get to use them, got £263 for them a few months later! RESULT!

The best thing I’ve bought however, is my Power Mac G5… Bought it a couple of months ago, it’s a top spec machine from 2004 so yes it is a few years old, but it’s still very good. Anyway, the upshot was that it was poorly advertised, but as I was only 30 miles away from the seller, I thought I’d take a punt on it at a low price… Ended up winning the auction for £180! And the machine is immaculate, very well looked after (was a design studio install), and had a fresh install of OSX on it. When I went to collect it, he chucked in a mouse and keyboard (another £30 worth on ebay) for free too… But the best bit, the same machines, advertised well on ebay, are selling for upwards of £400 at the moment!!! That’ll be a nice bonus when I upgrade it to an Intel Mac sometime…

dunno about sold but i bought an ‘as new’ stem that was scratched and coloured in with a pen!!

2001 Bombers (In 2004) post crash twisted lowers wheel would barley go round – sold as Spares or Repairs for about £40 with postage good good feedback too

I sold a commencal supreme frameset that had been smashed into by a van as it was mounted on the rear of my car. The front end was damaged, shock bent but rear end appeared ok. Described as such, only useful for a rear end and got about £100. Madness.

elf,

I love scientific instruments, what do you have for sale just now?

Erm, let’s have a look…

I’ve got a nice old Gillet and Sibert microscope; it’s got a built-in light unit, 3 lenses. I haven’t sussed out it’s spec yet. Heavy bastard.

An incomplete air sample meter type thing; don’t have it to hand right at this moment though. A couple of other little bits. Need to replenish stocks actually. It’s all stuff that gets junked by college and uni labs. Just tossed in skips. It’s criminal what they throw away.

Got a nice little Nuclear Enterprises NM2 Neutron Monitor; use it as a doorstop! Frightens doorstep callers…

Should have another load of stuff in soon. I’ll email you when I know more what I’ve got.

G+S is a bit like this, but with a rectangular stage, and a bit chunkier. It’s not in the best condition tbh; been knocking around in a basement probbly.

I’m hoping to find something with those highly sought after cold cathode tube displays; people turn them into clocks and stuff.

Got some old Apple laptops actually…

Few years ago I wanted to sell some bits and bobs on eBay but having never done so before wanted to do a dry run to see what the process with paypal and such was. Did a silly ad for a shoehorn I got free with some shoes (described as a designer shoe horn) with the intention that my mate would buy it for 99p, pay for it with paypal and I’d give him a shiny pound coin. Everyone in the office left silly questions about it “will it work on other designer shoes?” “is it for left or right shoes” I was all lots of fun.
Last day of listing a bidding war started between 2 equally stupid people and it ended up selling for close to a tenner!
Also sold a carrier bag from Selfridges for 8quid!

That reminds me of when I listed a cardboard bike box on ebay as a joke / wind up. Someone actually bought it for £10 – trouble was I didn’t even have a bike box so I had to get a mate to out bid the fool.

My cousin got what he thought was a bargain GT avalance for £50 cost another £10 in fuel to pick it up. Turned out to be knackerd. Everything was damaged on it. One afternoon and a pot of tea later we had it stripped to parts and listed as spares or repair. The frame alone sold for £40 and the damaged forks for £25.

I used to work for a major games retailer when I was a student, I used to sell all the freebies, posters, standees we got sent. I was making a tidy profit till head office got wind of it and they clamped down on it. One month I made £500 for a few hours on eBay.

Best bargain a sega megadrive with games, it was listed as a seag system. Cost me £3 plus post, I played it solid for a few days to relive my childhood and then sold it on for £30

Worse sale was my Marin Hawk Hill 2003 as I wish I would have kept it, it was s sublime ride.

Never really made much on Ebay but been sold a couple of right minging items. Worst was a Giant Box2 with White Bros triple clamp forks which turned out to be RST’s with White stickers on. The other was a titanium bar stem combo which was supposedly 1 1/8″ x 100mm and 24″ wide – turned out to be 1 1/4″ x 150mm and 20″ ! Following my complaint the guy refunded £10 then forgot he’d done it and sent me the whole purchase price on top. When he realised what he’d done he threatened to ‘pay me a visit’ – all this happened within 24 hours of me receiving the item!

I once sold a frame that I was given for free for £180… After I’d tried to give it away myself but nobody wanted it! I still feel a bit guilty about that, but I did give £50 of it to mountain rescue so I guess some good came of it…

Have been disappointed a couple of times.

Bought a Cotic Soul frame that had been handpainted in black – quality of finish was poor. Very unhappy.

Bought some XT cranks from someone who was ‘very fussy’, nearly cut myself getting them out the box the teeth we so sharp, the bb wouldn’t turn and the splines on the axle wouldn’t engage and the plastic tensioner thing was missing. So nothing usable at all! I did give them a poor rating but didn’t get any sympathy or refund.

Bought a Fender Stratocaster which turned out to be almost completely shagged, and missing several parts too. £270 it was, wasn’t worth half that. But that’s OK because I hounded the seller till I got a full refund, and he didn’t ask for the guitar back, so £270 went into new parts for it and it came out better than new.

Best sale I guess would be the Squier Stagemaster I bought for £99 new and sold for £240 3 years later. No idea what that was about.

Oh aye, selling – I did manage to sell most of the bits off the bike I was riding when I got run over by a car. The back end was completely destroyed, but the front end was fine, so sold off the brakes, shifters, etc.

Best sale was my MK1 Astra GTE, bought for £250 with 10 months tax and MOT, sold for £900 when they ran out, needed so much welding it just wasn’t worth keeping, the guy who bought it treailered it away from me in Pompy up to Scotland and was really happy!

Worst thing I’ve bought was a ‘genuine’ Surefire Scout light, new they go for £300ish. I paid £100 and was happy until the cheap chinese clone arrived… Still, got a refund through Paypal but am much more wary now.

Elf my young un would like that scope what’s it going for 😉

Bought a 2006 Giant reign for 400 last year. Ad said all was good, seemed Ok when I picked it up and rode well for a few weeks then fell apart. New rear mech, shifters, juicy 3’s, BB, cranks and wheels. Bought new bits on FeeBay cheap as poss and sold for 620….lost about 100 in the end but had some fun on the old girl.