Read on to find out three reasons why it is hard to find genuine memorabilia on eBay, and why you should avoid this site if you are planning to sell valuable original items:

– EBay is probably the world’s largest online marketplace. Millions of people buy and sell products in auctions hosted on this platform. Because of the high number of sales and users, it is difficult to monitor transactions, and many people take advantage of this issue. This is the reason why approximately 90% of music memorabilia offered on eBay today is fake. Nobody wants to buy on a market where forgery affects 9 out of 10 products. Users have low levels of trust in expensive items listed on the site. Therefore, serious buyers with larger budgets tend to avoid eBay, and prefer to spend their money at traditional auction houses.

– As a result, eBay remains a platform for collectors that cannot afford to buy at auction houses. However, there are tens of thousands of cheaper items on eBay related to any given artist: CDs, vinyl records, magazines, and T-shirts.

Even if your item is proven to be genuine, and it has a very strong provenance, there is a high probability that it will be lost among the other products, and few people will be able to find it. In the best case scenario, a few hundred people will notice your listing, but if you do not have many deep-pocketed bidders, there is no chance that your item will receive a lot of bids and a high final price. A Michael Jackson signature rarely reaches a final price over $1,000 on eBay, whereas traditional auction houses may be able to sell the same item for $3,000. This is due to the fact that auction house catalogues reach thousands of people contrary to eBay listings. Furthermore, auction houses also notify collectors about auctions through newsletters, and they publicize them in online media as well as in fan forums.

– The joint “Buyer’s protection” service of eBay and PayPal carries additional risks. Ebay currently prioritizes the buyers’ interests over sellers’ interests. This means that if a buyer raises a complaint claiming that he received an empty (opened) envelope when you posted several rare Michael Jackson concert tickets, eBay will almost certainly decide in favour of the buyer. As a result, the seller will have to refund the price of the items. This is what happened to the seller in this picture, who sold an authentic Michael Jackson fedora worth $8,000 on eBay. The buyer claimed that he received an empty package. Even though the transaction had a tracking number, eBay did not care. The buyer got his money back and ran away with the hat.

As a result of this unfair and annoying situation, even sellers owning rare and valuable items avoid eBay, so the percentage of fake memorabilia continues to grow on the online marketplace.