Have you ever bought anything on eBay? The online auction house is an excellent way to buy certain things, such as DVDs and books, often at knock-down prices. I say ?is an excellent way?, but that should read ?was an excellent way?. A once-supremely useful buy/sell mechanism has been hijacked and should now be avoided at all costs.

Call me an ageing hippie if you must, but what I liked about eBay, its ease of use and reliability apart, was that it was C-to-C e-commerce.

Customer to customer. Generally speaking, eBay sellers were regular people, not the greedy, profit-crazed business people that one often has to deal with online and, sometimes, in the real world.

On one occasion, for example, a man sent me the book I ordered with a 50 percent refund because, he wrote, ?the book, when I looked at it, was not in as good a shape as I had advertised it?. He offered me a full refund if I was not satisfied. On another occasion, I accidentally sent two $20 bills stuck together in payment for a $20 item. The overpayment was returned with the item.

Buying items on eBay, though cheap, was something of a hassle for a Bermuda resident. I chose not to use PayPal, the online payment system, because no greater temptation exists for hackers than a database of everyone?s credit card details. You just know PayPal is going to be hacked wide open one day, and credit card companies can be very unforgiving if items are purchased with your card before you discover the theft and advise the credit card issuer.

Not using PayPal meant that, for every item I bought, I had to print out the order sheet, find some US dollars in cash, and put the whole thing in an envelope stuffed with cardboard to disguise the fact that there was cash in it. Finally, two trips to the Post Office were required: one to mail the payment and the other to collect the item and pay a dollar or two in duty.

I didn?t mind this labour-intensive process, because either I saved a bunch of money, or I was able to obtain an item not available in the ?first-hand? stores, or both. I successfully concluded 195 out of 196 transactions. The odd one out was a case two weeks ago, where an employee of the store I bought a DVD from stole the cash from my envelope.

Greedy sellers, folk with no moral compass, have invaded eBay. Following the theft of my $6, I e-mailed the seller, who was charming and apologetic ? and then placed me on the stop list reserved for liars and cheats. I tried to pay again, this time by credit card, but to no avail. The seller had me down as a crook and didn?t accept credit cards from crooks. It took a great deal of hassle to get them to accept my payment.

The experience was so awful that I opted to stop buying from eBay in the US altogether, and started buying instead from eBay in the UK.

The beauty of that was that I could send a UK cheque (I have an account in London from the time I lived there), and cheques are harder to steal with impunity than cash.

About a week ago, I bid for and won three DVDs from separate buyers on eBay UK. I duly e-mailed each one, as I always did, to explain that I was airmailing a cheque from Bermuda, and that it should take about a week to arrive in the UK. All three ignored the e-mails and placed me on the stop list within 48 hours of the auction closing. The payments could not possibly have reached the sellers by that time, but I came to understand that these sellers don?t care. They bang you on the stop list automatically, destroy your good name, and might take you off the list if they can be bothered, when they receive your payment.

Under these circumstances, eBay becomes a guaranteed loss, like betting on 37 at a roulette table with slots from zero to 36. There is a dispute resolution system, but it works only in favour of the seller. The stop list is just like its real-world equivalent at the airport: get on it, and you?ll never get off.

I don?t have any shares in eBay, but if I did I?d sell them for whatever they were worth, or just throw them away. I?m not saying that my refusal to deal with these people will drag the company down, or make any difference at all, but I am saying, as an early adopter, that I will never do business on eBay again. As other innocent buyers have the same ugly experience, they are likely to conclude the same thing.

There was a blissful time when eBay was the preserve of honest men and women. There was also a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth. Both those days have gone. We will not see their like again.

I?ve had a good run, and have lined my bookshelves. But still, the loss of this mechanism is truly disappointing, given what it says about people?s inability to resist heavy-handedness. Is there nowhere in the world where an honest man is not regarded as a potential victim? Apparently not. Heavy, heavy sigh.

@EDITRULE: