Who doesn’t like messing around on eBay, whether just idly having a look at how much stuff is selling for or actually looking to land something you want for a killer price?

I got a call the other day from a friend’s brother, asking if I would mind logging on to eBay to have a look at a caravan he’d seen – and which he was seriously interested in buying. I logged on and had a look.

Yes, I had to agree – the Avondale Dart was described in such a way that it sounded like a bargain, but there were a couple of things that made me cautious.

The first was the fact that, although he waxed lyrical about what a great caravan it was, the seller had included just three poor-quality photographs that looked like they’d been taken on a low-rent mobile phone camera. Is that a sign of somebody confident in the quality of the product he’s trying to sell? No, it isn’t – quite the opposite, I’d say.

But trumping that was the fact that the seller was more than 200 miles away, which by itself was enough for me to suggest to my enquirer that he look elsewhere – unless he was prepared to make a 400-mile round trip to go and make a thorough inspection of the caravan before bidding on it.

To my mind, there are two types of eBay caravan buyers: those who go to see the caravan first and those who regret not having done so.

The problem is that, even if a seller doesn’t deliberately set out to deceive, he or she may not include everything.

It may not even have entered the vendor’s mind to mention that 60 fags get smoked in it every weekend – leaving a lingering stench which he doesn’t even notice, but which will hit you the second you pull open the door.

And it’ll always be there, regardless of how much upholstery cleaner and soapy water you lavish on it.

The seller may have perused all the other caravan ads on eBay and seen all the best words to use: spotless, pristine, unmarked, like new… and so on.

Somebody else’s definition of ‘spotless’ may differ fundamentally from yours, though – leaving you shell-shocked when you go to collect a caravan with a plethora of smells, squeaks, rattles, stains and dents that you expected not to be there.

By all means use eBay when looking for your next caravan. But arrange your search results by distance from your home postcode and exclude any that are too far away for you to go and see.

If, however, you’re after a particularly hard-to-find caravan that doesn’t come up very often and which you want badly enough to bid on unseen, contact the seller first and bombard him or her with a long list of pertinent questions.

At least then you’ll have a cast-iron get-out clause if you have the winning bid, then turn up to find that some of the answers you were given were – whether intentionally or not – wide of the mark.

Buy on eBay, yes – but don’t buy blind!

Postscript: my pal’s brother took my advice and ended his interest in the Dart. The weekend after talking to me, he bought a tidy Coachman from a local dealer that was £300 more expensive, but which came with a service and a warranty.

Buying from a dealer? Yes, well, why not? But that’s another story…