Stay away from ebay. Review on Ebay

I'd heard about vehicles being sold on ebay (yes, even in India!) and decided to give it a shot.

Using my erstwhile baazee account which ebay most graciously converted into its account, I posted an ad for the Alto. Must say I was a bit sceptical and didn't really expect anything to come out of it.

Imagine my surprise when, in two days or so I got an alert saying a buyer from Mangalore had clicked on quick buy and 'bought' the car. The DD would be sent soon, the message said.

So, why am I warning you guys against ebay?

Well, no surprises here: the sale was a 'mistake'. The 'buyer' said his son had clicked on the buy option by mistake!!! I fumed and posted a stinker on the ebay site, considering the fellow didn't bother to inform me.

I tried unsuccessfully to post a complaint, but the relevant ebay link was not working. There didn't seem to be any option to alert the site that the sale had not gone through.

The saga didn't end there. A few days later, ebay sent me a message asking me to pay 1 per cent of the sale value since the transaction had been completed according to them! Now, this was real sneaky since there was no mention of the commission at the time of posting or the print was so fine that I'd have needed to zoom 500% to see it.

I sent them a nice mail explaining the facts. And asking them to reverse the entry since no sale had taken place. Also that I found it rather unethical on their part in any event to ask for a commission posto facto instead of up front at the time of posting.

I kept getting reminders to pay the hidden commission on the non-transaction for some weeks and finally was forced to tell them to go to hell and take it from the devil himself (well, I used slightly more polite language but the import was the same).

Then they started sending me mails to go to the site and go through some long-winded procedure to set the record right. I told them the record had been set straight on email and frankly I didn't have the time to bother with their procedures. Can you imagine: this seemed like the electronic equivalent of a pathetic government office attitude!

At last, they figured out that they wouldn't get me to jump through their silly hoops and someone from Australia or Singapore or wherever sent me a mail saying the charge had been reversed.

The punchline? Well I got mails after that one saying I still owed them the commission and a couple of mails saying (joy, at last!) my account would be deactivated. I hope it has been deactivated for that's the only way I won't hear from them any more. Hopefully.