Live and learn.....

Warning! This is long and I am whining. I had my first bad experience on EBay. I Bid and won a "lot" of babyclothes. I won the items March 8th and paid immediately (over 100 dollars for an assortment of baby clothing) via paypal like I always do. Did not receive the items until yesterday almost a month later. This was after several attempts to contact the seller with no response. Since it had almost been 30 days I filed a paypal investigation so I would be able to get my money back if need be. The seller finally answered and they said they had been out of town. Promised to ship that day but still appeared to wait a day or 2 before shipping and providing a tracking number. They then emailed me asking me to resolve the investigation so that they would be able to withdraw all their paypal funds received. So I did on the faith that I would receive the items. I finally did receive them and was disappointed. The items were poorly packed, basically dumped in a shopping bag thrown loosely in a dingy box. Alot of the clothes were quite dingy also. During my wait for the items I read all of the sellers prior feedback. While some of it was good there was quite a bit of negative. Complaints were similar such as slow shipper, misrepresented items, items never received, numerous excuses and the words Fraud and Crook were even noted in some of the feedback messages. I have never left anyone any bad feedback before and even only left a neutral for this seller with a simple warning to future buyers to read all of the sellers feedback prebidding. This seller then retaliated by leaving me my 1 and only negative feedback comment saying I was unfair and asked me not to bid on any more of their items. No problem there, I never would have bid in the first place if I had read all of their feedback comments first. ....So if your still with me the moral of this story is to read the sellers feedback first! This event has left a sour taste in my mouth so I will probably take a break from EBay for a while now. Actually not a bad thing as I need to be saving my money not spending it.