I've purchased three machines on eBay. The first two were Featherweights... no problems with those transactions. The third was a Bernina 1630. I was having trouble getting my 1630 repaired and just wanted one that worked while the other one was in the shop for months.
I always check the feedback score of the seller. This seller had lots of excellent feedback, but I didn't notice at the time that most of those feedbacks were for items that she purchased, not sold.
She was selling a stripped down 1630 that only included one foot and no hard case. That was fine with me since I already owned plenty of feet and had a hard case. The price with shipping was $361.47. It arrived professionally packaged. I wanted to have a maintenance done on it before using since I didn't know the last time it was done. The repairs that maintenance revealed cost me $575.00.
I could have returned it through eBay's guaranteed which would have included the shipping cost to me. Unfortunately, I would still have to pay about $200 for the maintenance and return shipping to the seller. I wasn't willing to spend $200 and end up with no machine at all. I had it fixed. That stripped down machine ended up costing me $936.47.
As if that wasn't bad enough, I notified the seller that I was going to leave negative feedback. I didn't hear anything from her for over a week. I left the negative feedback and heard nothing more for a month. She then contacted me and called me every bad name in the book. Apparently, she felt that she was the injured party. Shakes head...