Expert Advice
Most of the eBay Guides we have written were taken from the pages of our various websites. We had to edit these as eBay do not permit external links (free advertising) on their website. For this reason, and others, we never include any links to eBay on any of our sites.
If you are looking for any of the information contained in our eBay Guides, you don't need to look on eBay, you will find more complete, and better versions of them on our own sites. Part of the reason for this is the image size limit in eBay guides 200 x 200 pixels, whereas our standard size on our sites is 400 x 400 pixels, effectively 4 times as large. When it comes to photographs bigger is generally better.
Because we need to edit useful links out of our eBay guides, we are forced to omit information which may be useful to the reader. Also, eBay do not permit the inclusion of references to other sites such as Google, so we have to refer to "good search engines", even though only one exists.
If we wish to name and shame a particular eBay member, perhaps a suspected fraudster, we have to be quite circumspect on eBay, whereas we can be quite direct on our own sites.
There is a word count limit on eBay guides, whereas on our own sites, we can chose the length and content of each page intelligently.

No HTML Code
We cannot include HTML code in our eBay Guides, so the layout is pretty dire on most of them, whereas we can edit our own pages with suitable layout.

Advice Starts Here
For advice about investing in gold, start at this link. For other topics, click our alphabetical or countries index pages.

Most Popular
Our most popular guide, according the eBay's statistics, is Sniping - Is it Good Strategy for Winning Auctions? on ebay.com; at the time of writing this page, it had been viewed 18,498 times, received 991 "helpful" votes, out of a total of 1,194 votes, meaning there had been 203 "not helpful". Subtracting 203 from 991 leaves a nett figure of 788.
We presume that many of the "negative" voters were either people selling sniping software on eBay, or brainwashed enthusiastic snipers.

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics
Of course, like much on eBay it's difficult to know quite what to believe, and to have much confidence in the accuracy of their figures. On one page, we are shown as "Reviewer rank: 24", while on another the figure stated is 18th. This may be because the first figure is overall, across all or several eBay sites (.com, .co.uk, etc), while the second figure is presumably on the UK site. We can find no explanation of this on eBays' sites, but that's only to be expected.
There is also no complete explanation of how their ranking system works, and we believe their database for it is corrupt, as there are numerous entries in their ranking list which are out of order. Also for a period of about six months during late 2007 to early 2008, we were demoted by about 2,000 places, as were a number of other contributors, some of whom contacted us to ask if we knew what was going on. We never did get to ask, or to find out, but eventually, somebody at eBay seems to have noticed, and corrected things, more or less.
Our total "useful" votes currently stand at 7,483 out of 8,793; so we must have also received 1,310 "not useful" votes; leaving a nett total of 6,173. Although this pales into insignificance when compared to the number 1 top reviewer who has received 50,085 "useful" votes out of 51,875; meaning 1,790 negative votes, for a nett score of 48,295. When we consider however that our guides are aimed at a tiny minority interest topic, coins, then we feel our achievement is quite good. Some of the most popular guides are on popular topics such as eBay feedback warning, DVDs, mobile phones, SIM codes, CDs, car boot sales, fake watches, fake Ugg boots, stolen TomToms, other fake designer goods. Many of the top reviewers have written "Reviews" in addition to "Guides", reviews are reviews about popular consumer products such as music CDs, books and the like.

Why Bother
Some may ask why we bother to write eBay Guides, when we don't get paid, or any other direct benefit for our efforts. The guides first came to our notice when we were doing a Google search one day and found a large amount of material from the information pages on our "Gold Sovereigns" website had been copied verbatim, and placed on eBay as a guide, by one of their other members. We informed eBay about the blatant copyright infringement, and they removed it. We decided that we may as well replace it with our own guide, pulled from the same source, and add some of our photographs.
Our first guide is still present, and has received 109 "useful" votes out of 116, after 6,102 viewings.

Anonymous Experts
Almost anybody can write an eBay guide, and there is not much quality control. Most eBay members remain fairly anonymous, and when getting advice, it's only sensible to know who is giving the advice, and to be able to judge their level of experience and expertise.
If you read something on our site, you know we wrote it (unless we state an alternative source), and our name and address is on every page.

Spoiler, Fraudsters & Cheats
Many eBay members use our copyright images without our permission. Also we expose a number of crooks and scammers. It is quite common for us to find a large number of "not helpful" votes registered against our eBay Guides in a very short space of time. This makes it obvious that somebody with a grudge has placed negative votes on a large number of our guides. We did report this to eBay, who informed us that interference with their sites was against their rules, but they appear, as usual, to have done nothing about it. We think that only positive votes should be allowed to count on their guides, this would eliminate vindictive voting from the bad guys. Again we expect eBay to do nothing about it as usual.

Taking Our Own Advice
Since creating this page, we have now stopped selling on eBay, for a number of reasons. One day we will get around to giving a detailed explanation, but right now it would take too much time, and we have a business to run!

eBay Scam Example Goingfast3 $1.2 Million Fraud Attempt
We helped to save potential buyers getting ripped off for over $1 million. eBay appears to have done nothing or very little.

New - Buy / Sell Prices on Gold Sovereign 4 Coin Proof Sets
We have recently created a new version of our original Proof Sovereign Sets page, with buy and sell prices quoted.

Selling Gold Coins & Bars on eBay