I first joined e-bay over 10 years ago, when it was in it's infancy. Back then it was really sweet, very few dealers, stores or high-volume sellers.
Like all other market-places (online, or in the real world), dealers really muddy the waters. I wish it was the kind of place it use to be, when it was a lot more private individuals selling and buying their personal stuff and a few things they're just selling to fund their other purchases.
Now, you have to be extremely careful to not get screwed by sellers (and buyers too). I'd like to think it's not intentional, but it makes you wonder sometimes. You have to evaluate every aspect of available information from sellers. They may very well have a really high feedback rating, but you also have to take in consideration their sales volume. For instance, it's possible for a seller to have a 99 % rating, but when you look closer at that rating detail, you can find they may have two pages of feedbacks for just that day! And in the last month, they may have had as much as a two dozen negatives for items not received or incorrect items delivered. I think this is a product of just having too much stuff going on at one time. When you have to ship out 20, 30, 50 items daily... eventually something's going to get screwed up. And to make matters worse, then that also means there's a lot of e-mails/messages going back and forth at the same time, therefore getting a problem resolved is just going to take a long time.
Personally, I try to stay away from high-volume sellers. Unfortunately, I find myself buying less and less from e-bay.
