Not to dismiss the comments about educating yourself, because that is incredibly important - even when some of the best books are a bit pricey because they had limited runs and are not always easily available, but I cannot stress enough the importance of finding trustworthy sellers - even for less expensive items.
When I started buying items after I was back in the US, I only knew about ePay and thankfully only bought stuff under $20-30. I got ripped off a few times, as might well be expected and didn't even know it until I found this forum. I was lucky in the sense that my main focus was on security service items and even in Russia they were not cheap so I didn't get stabbed in the back very often in that area.
Read all you can, study it well, listen to the folks who know and have been doing this for long enough to be knowledgeable and burned (I never really trust anyone who never admits to having made mistakes), but don't think they walk on water because they have more experience than you. This comes back to my original point - find and only do business with people you can trust and who won't charge you outrageous prices.
Just by looking at the "marketplace" on the forum, you should be able to get a good idea of who is selling at reasonable prices.
Oh, and one last thing: don't be in a rush to get everything you want right away. It took me years of waiting for both the right items and the right people that I could trust to land most of the greatest (to my mind) pieces in my collection.
Tommy Wrote:... it's knowing who you can trust!
Tommy
That's a pretty short list I'm afraid, but you can find most of the people I would put on that list right here. Read the feedback before you buy (here and everywhere else you are looking because, amazing as it may seem, not everything on the e-auction is a fake, but you have to dig deeply to find the good stuff).
Phillip
