Ebay Fiasco

I've just recently really begun making purchases on Ebay. Yes, Iw as fully aware of it before but you have to be cautious when you're ordering this stuff and even more cautious when you're entering in your maximum bid. I can see why it becomes addictive. Nothing is worse than watching as someone outbids you in the last minute or minute and a half of an auction and walks away with what should hav ebeen yours.

Then I fell into a trap. I've won a few things on Ebay and really enjoyed knowing i didn't pay retail for them. But thus comes hte paradox of the Balenciaga bag. it's my new secret obsession. Retailing for $1000 and up, these bags are lovely, vintage looking and hold lots of stuff. They are being seen on everyone famous. Except i have a feeling that the famous people don't even have to pay for them. So I've become a little obsessed with them. Just a little.

I did what any American girl with a break at work and keyboard at her fingertips would do. I typed my request into Ebay's search engine and it came back with something like 600 of these bags up for grabs. Natrually I could see that almost all of these "authentic 1000% guaranteed bags were fakes" but there were a few that sounded convincing. So I bid on one, and WON. I was happily congratulating myself on getting this bag for more than 75% off when I came across an article about a woman who had been through a similar experience, paid a fortune for a "real" bag, and then received a fake. My stomach dropped. I began doing more and more research and found that i'm in no shape to be ordering Balenciagas on line. I'm not even sure what half of the stuff on them IS. And theres a big difference between paying 1000 for a real bag and paying a smaller fortune for a good fake bag. I checked on the street outside my office and have found they go for around thirty bucks. That's a much better deal.

So I waited impatiently for the package to arrive. Of course i hadn't been paying attention to where it was coming from and so I was being sent a purse from Switzerland. Thank goodness the girl who sold it to me was really nice about it. Otherwise I would have been even more stressed out. I waited, and waited. And waited some more. But hte bag continued to not show up at all and then I thought I really had been ripped off. So I kept harassing this poor Swiss girl with imperfect English and finally received the bag. Of course, i knew when I pulled it out that it wasn't real. Certain small details didn't match up at all.

Fortunately Ebay is set up to handle these disputes. If you use Paypal, there's a good chance you'll get at least some of your money back, and I was one of hte lucky ones. But I have learned my lesson. I made a phone call to the Balenciaga boutique to see if there was a chance it was real and the woman on the phone told me that in the five years she had been with hte company she had never seen a real one come off a website. What makes this worse is that when I told the Swiss girl this she was shocked, saying she had originally purchased the bag on ebay and was told it was real. I'm sad for every girl out there who thinks that you can get a $1000 bag for $200. Even if it was stolen off the back of a truck, no way would anyone part with those for so little.

Now I'm going to be a lot more suspicious about what I purchase off Ebay. but it saddens me that a website built on trust like this has so many false people becoming a part of it. I can only imagine what's out on the streets.