The website is every collector's delight. A friend of mine, whose definitive measure of being a good mother was to provide her child with a rocking horse, found herself a vintage Gibbs miniature cherry wood rocking horse made in 1911.
Don't bid until the very last. You are unnecessarily raising the bid price. Let others fight over it until the end. Minutes before closing, if the price is still agreeable to you, step into the arena - the matador that appears unseen from the shadows - and grab the bull by its horns

Once you are on eBay, there is no turning back. The ambitious experiment in Internet commerce, that pioneered person-to-person online trading and earned CEO, Meg Whitman, the top spot in Fortune magazine this year, has snowballed into a 24/7 efficient and often entertaining site. Offering tips on how to avoid the pitfalls of e-buying, self-confessed addict, Arati Menon-Carroll, declares that the online marketplace is the answer to your every shopping whim

Right at the outset, I confess. I am addicted to eBay. They say admitting your fixation is the first step to recovery. But the central issue here is: do I want to recover? eBay is certainly here to stay, and I'm clearly hooked. It all began with the magic of the swirling patterns and psychedelic hues of an Emilio Pucci scarf. Blame it on the Pucci, I say! A harmless (actually, don't let a woman ever tell you any kind of shopping expedition is harmless) hunt for a Pucci bargain (did I say Pucci and bargain in the same sentence?) led me to my discovery of eBay. The rest as they say is history. Once you're on the site (and are an e-buyer!) there's no turning back.

Imagine the vision behind the power of one website to generate global business totalling millions of dollars a day? Jeff Skoll founded eBay on Labour Day in 1995 as a grand experiment in Internet commerce that pioneered person-to-person online trading. Since then, this site has become more popular than he ever expected and has developed into an efficient and often entertaining trading site on the Web that is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Even as I revelled in the sheer beauty of my very first purchase, that wonderfully luxurious Pucci scarf, I realised that I had made my very first mistake as an e-buyer. I hadn't adequately scoped out the scene before indulging my fancy! Till date I have witnessed the sale of 43 Pucci scarves at prices that have made me cringe with guilt at my costly buy. Lesson One: Do not assume that every high fashion item on sale is a bargain item. eBay is not a bargain site.

Okay, so my use of the website hasn't ventured beyond the narrow spectrum of fashion but please don't let my myopic shopping needs lead you to presume that's all that eBay has to offer. With over 1,000 categories, including antiques, books, movies and music, coins and stamps, dolls and porcelain figures, jewellery and gemstones, photographs and electronics, pottery, glass and sports memorabilia, eBay is the answer to your every shopping list and much, much more. Sometimes a little too much more! Someone recently auctioned a nuclear submarine on eBay. Before the site pulled out the auction since it was illegal, the submarine was receiving bids well into six figures!

So we hear about strange things being sold on eBay… An employed Berlin executive once put himself up for auction on eBay at a starting price of one Euro, only to have his bid quickly revoked.

But eBay isn't just about buying. For the princely sum of 30 cents (as I write this) you could be selling pretty much anything from the clothes your babies outgrew, to a record collection and even your roll-top desk. Post it up on eBay, initiate the bidding and watch in incredulity as people start frantically bidding for your item!

Arati Menon-Carroll is a Mumbai-based self-confessed shopaholic and a freelance features writer. She is excited by the power of human potential and by the possibilities that lie in anything new and unexplored.