Ethics and eBay

I was in awe when I went home to visit my family and discovered that my brother was extremely savvy when it came to selling and buying things on the Internet. His most recent obsession was with a well known site called eBay. eBay, like many other sites that have popped up over the years, is a place where people can buy and sell goods to one another. Naturally, eBay charges each person a small fee for each transaction that is made, but apparently the good far outweighs the bad.

One of the best things about eBay is the fact that it allows each person to act as their own sort of business person. They decide what they want to sell and to whom they want to sell the item(s) to. In exchange, they usually stand to make a somewhat substantial profit from the sale of an item depending on how much the item actually sells for. However, there are some things to be aware of when you use a site like this. For instance, there have been plenty of times when unscrupulous sellers will try to sell other people goods that aren’t of high quality. In this case, you wind up getting stuck with something that is broken, doesn’t work or wasn’t worth what you paid for it originally.

In the event that you receive an item that is damaged or in the event that you don’t receive an item at all, you can write a negative review about the person who sold it to you. This negative review will then caution others as to the quality of the goods that a person sells to other people online. In essence, it damages that seller’s credibility (something you don’t ever want to happen). One of the main things to keep in mind whenever you decide to conduct business transactions online such as selling goods to other people, you should remember your ethics. Is it really ethical to put something up for sale and then mark up the price- knowing full well that the item you are trying to sell isn’t worth half of what it is selling for? How would you feel if you received an item like this? These are important considerations.

There are plenty of unethical people in the world who are so focused on making money that they will literally do anything that they have to in order to make that dream a reality. It is important, therefore, to exercise caution whenever you purchase something on the Internet. What seems like a really good deal at the time on a particular item may come back to bite you. For instance, recently for Christmas, my brother purchased the entire Columbo television series from an independent seller online who was selling the series for a fraction of the price that you would normally have to pay. It was too good to be true (literally). When my brother gave the gift to my father at Christmas and my father opened it up, he later discovered that more than half of the series was missing. My brother wound up having to send the entire series back and spoke with the seller about the missing DVDs. In the end, it was all resolved, but was it worth it? Was the seller trying to get away with something unethical until he or she was caught?