Online Auction Follow-up

In our previous episode, I sang the praises of online auctions. In light of my last two weeks, I would like to add more information and suggestions. I have just had two not-so-great experiences on eBay^TM. I don't blame eBay for them, so I'm not going to stop buying and selling on eBay, but I am going to change what I buy and how, and I hope you can learn from my experiences.

Not-So-Great Experience #1
I bought a CD-RW machine. The guy I bought it from didn't send the appropriate and promised cables or instruction manual. I went to the company and replaced these. I now cannot get the machine to work, and am concerned it is incompatible with my computer. The company has kindly offered to give me an RMA number so I can send it back and they will check it. But apart from that nice gesture, I'd have no recourse. I'm sure the guy who sold it doesn't want it back and doesn't want to send me my money. This taught me that online auctions may not be the best place to buy computer hardware.

Why?
1. Your recourse may be limited or none if you find that the equipment you bought is incompatible with your current equipment.
2. If the equipment is used or does not come with a warranty for some reason, you're once again up the creek.

Not-So-Great Experience #2
People are selling software all the time through online auctions. Most of it is legal unopened boxed software with the appropriate warranty cards or certificates of authenticity. However, some items for sale unfortunately are illegal pirated copies. And I just found out the hard way. I never dreamed that it would happen to me, yes I was that naive. I bought a CD of Microsoft Office97 Pro Edition, and based on the item's description, I had no reason to think it wasn't real. It's not like people list their items and include "Oh, buy the way, this copy is illegal and pirated and won't even work right." I had problems installing the suite, and just chalked it up to my perceptions of Microsoft and the fact that I have the Corel suite, Office97's main competitor, already on my hard drive. I even posted twice to the newsgroup microsoft.public.office.setup to ask if anyone knew why my Office wasn't installing right, but when nobody responded, I gave up. Last week, I got an email from a woman who won the same item I did, and she was having worse problems. After doing some research, she came to the conclusion that we both had pirated non-working copies.

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