Ebay Good Surprise Stories

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ecosse

Active Member
Jul 2, 2013
463
111
43
I assume most people have had a bad experience or two but any good ones?

I bought a couple pf SC847A 4U chassis with 36 drive bays for a storage project off ebay at a reasonable price for the UK. When I opened the first one I was someone surprised to find a supermicro motherboard in there- pretty old but still more than usable with a CPU / cooler, 16GB DDR memory, 5 LSI 2 port 6GBps HBA's and all the cabling. The other one didn't have the motherboard but still had the LSI HBA's. No hard drives unfortunately! I assume it was harder for them to take out and dispose of. Just wondered if anyone has had a similar good experience.
 

Aestr

Well-Known Member
Oct 22, 2014
967
386
63
Seattle
I recently got a 24U Netshelter CX in great condition for $510 local pickup. When I show up it was nicely shrink wrapped. After unwrapping it at home I find that they left an APC SMX2000RMLV2U with network card in there.
 

BLinux

cat lover server enthusiast
Jul 7, 2016
2,669
1,081
113
artofserver.com
not a story as a buyer, but as as seller on eBay: i had a buyer in Greece who didn't get the item i sent him; turns out eBay Global Shipping (EGS) lost the package. it should have been a simple problem, because EGS pretty much assumes liability and will refund the buyer. but the buyer misunderstood instructions i gave, and open a dispute with PayPal, which got closed in my favor due to EGS losing the package. basically, PayPal was saying eBay should pay for this. but eBay won't allow you to open a case if you've already opened a PayPal dispute, so they were basically saying go deal with PayPal. the buyer was getting bounced back and forth between eBay and PayPal (they really need to figure their shit out)... i felt really bad for the guy, and tried to talk to both eBay and PayPal to see what could be done to fix the problem. several hours on the phone with several levels of people got no where. the guy in Greece basically was ready to give up. as a last ditch effort, i did some crafty online searching and found the email address for Devin Wenig, CEO of eBay and wrote him a letter explaining the situation. I was not expecting any response... big surprise when I got a response the next morning and after a few more email exchanges with transaction details, the problem got fixed in less than 30 minutes! guy in Greece was so happy when he found out he got his money back!
 
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vl1969

Active Member
Feb 5, 2014
634
76
28
Well, I had a good experience about 9 or 10 years ago.
I found a 24U cabinet listing and bid 24$ for it. Local pickup.
Did it for fun mostly. Not expecting to win.
5 days later the bid stick and I won
When I went to pick it up
It had 2 a
Apc psu in it and a pdc.
Old but usable. I still use one psu with new batteries.
 

BeTeP

Well-Known Member
Mar 23, 2019
653
429
63
Every time I get a package delivered on time and intact - it's a good surprise story in my book. Because it does not happen that often. Specially for the large and heavy stuff.
 

TerryPhillips

New Member
May 7, 2019
23
6
3
Once upon a time I use to do a lot of server hardware buy/sell on ebay, primarily to get stuff for my home lab. At that time vendors were charging corporate customers to pickup old server hardware in the DFW area, so I started doing it for free. I'd sell some stuff and then buy what I wanted. It was always fun to keep an eye out for the hidden deals such as:
  • A 64 drive XioTech Magnitude SAN storage unit w/64 15k drives. I won the unit for $36 and a drive from Dallas to Chicago to pick it up. I think I made over $3600 on the drives alone...
  • An IBM BladeCenter S chassis for $700 buy now. SOLD! as the unit had an 8GB fiber channel switch and a 10Gb Cisco networking switch. By the time I parted out the whole thing I made well over 10K in profit...
  • A 10gb Cisco IBM BladeCenter switch that was posted in the wrong category and ending late on Thanksgiving (easy snipe) for which i won for $286 and flipped for $5500...
  • Not ebay, but in the same thread: if you don't mind a sore back, all the free UPS batteries you can haul away. I had a corporate customer offer me their old batteries after a refresh, just come and get them. At 100lbs a piece, it was a painful week to follow, but after hauling 60 of them to the salvage yard where I was getting .28 cents a pound, a couple of massages and a pocket full of cash made it all good...
 
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