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The less bidders, the lower the price! Or, it used to be, before the sniping services allowed people to program bids to happen at the last gasp. BTW: sniping is 'strictly against eBay's rules.'

Buy on a holiday, when other bidders are on the beach or around their mother's for mothering Sunday.

Buy in the dead hours of the morning. An inexperienced seller will have their end time when most people are tucked up at night.

Don't bid on items when the rest of the world is there and bidding—after tea and before 11pm.

Avoid auction herding, where you see that others are bidding so you join too... Remember, you're not alone and the object, or ideal is the be the only bidder on your item.

It's a common mistake to let your competitiveness take over. The object is not to win, but to buy cheaply.

Set a price that you'll not go over and stick to it. There'll be plenty of other mobile phones along later, eventually, you'll get the price you want.

Check the completed listing, see the final prices for the models you're interested in. See the highest? Why was it high? Was it a frenzied herd, was there something in the package? Some extra software perhaps. Conversely, the lowest items... When did they end? Was there damage, was the seller dodgy?

When you find an item that you may want to bid on, check out the seller. Look at the number of sales. Avoid sellers with only a very small number of sales, certainly those with zero sales, or perhaps anyone below 5 sales. See when those sales occurred, are they from a long time ago and are just starting up again? They could be from a hijacked account.

Check also their feedback, 100% is nice, but sometimes a good seller has a run of the buyers from hell and their feedback maybe quite low, especially, and obviously if the number of sales is low.

The riskier the seller, the lower the final sale price of the item! You pays your money, you takes your choice. It all depends on your tolerance of risk.

After your research into the completed sales, you'll see some BIN sales, and generally, they'll be higher than the 'usual' sale prices of auctions. Mostly, sellers will have researched as you have and will have set a higher price for BINs.

However, sometimes you'll get an inexperienced seller with a low BIN...You never know :-)

It's best to have some fall back position. Credit cards and Paypal each will return your money if the deal goes wrong.

If you can pay by credit card, ideally it's the best. Do a quick charge back, get the money back, ask questions later.

Paypal will also return your money but only up to a maximum of £500. See their Paypal buyer protection page. And it takes a lot of arguing and a bit of time. Be sure to claim within 45 days of paying with Paypal.

eBay is slow and in my experience impossible to return your money with their eBay standard purchase protection policy. Which will return a maximum of £105, you'll need proof of payment and if you paid with a credit card or Paypal, you have to try them first.

Avoid, avoid, avoid personal cheques, post office orders, back transfers and certainly cash!

The first, is the empty shell, display phone. Usually, they're always flagged up as being display phones, and they'll always have a low, low price.

The deadliest, are the Chinese fakes, or rip-offs, or clones; depends on your point of view. Sometimes the prices isn't too low, as others have herded to the auction and bid them up. But be careful, they're generally, and honestly flagged as a clone, just that sometimes, in the heat of the chase, you may not read the small or more usually large type saying, "this is not a genuine Nokia." Many people have bought clones thinking they were the real thing, and they won a bargain.

The most common is the Nokla N95 and the Nokia N95. Did you spot that extra "L"? That's right it's a NokLa. You'll most probably see this company in the misspellings pages. This cloner, in China, makes a quite good touch screen display phone... But, it's dual-band. See pictures and a scathing, side by side look at the two phones.