Often, eBay sellers are the same mom-and-pop's that sell through Amazon (and per agreements with Amazon, the same prices, though some of them put "or best offer" or whatever), and - through eBay - I'm offered more personal interaction and (also) I suspect the mom-and-pop's get a higher percentage of the total sales amount - though eBay takes a bunch. (I'm not a fan of Amazon, and it's a last-resort thing. One of my offspring has "prime", so - when I DO resort to Amazon - I use their account.)
Particularly with car parts, some/many of the sellers are below 99% positive feedback, but here's what I do:
I READ the negative comments in conjunction with the negative feedback (many of which are unreasonable or just plain ignorant...After all, they're just like peeps we encounter elsewhere
). Simultaneously, I SPECIFICALLY search for negative feedback on the PARTICULAR car part (when they've sold 150 of them, as an example).
If the negatives are mostly dumb, and no negatives on the part I'm interested in buying, I'll probably buy from that seller.
Even though this may be contradictory to the previous, if someone rates 96.5% and someone else rates 98.5% - and the 98.5% is only a few dollars more (such as $78 vs. $72), I'll probably buy theirs.
yeah...I still look at tubas on eBay...but mostly junk, trash, and $12,000...but occasionally (just as with casinos and gas station scratch off cards) there's a winner. I never look at trumpets (others pay crazy-high prices for the most hopelessly ragged-out instruments), and I balk at trombones, as slides are often either trashed or repair-shop-ruined...French horns: nope...valves
