I thought I was being as reasonable as one could be under the circumstances. Four weeks went by and the bass never appeared at my home. If you do buy or sell, be prepared for grief. You may be dealing with someone who is inexperienced buying instruments sight unseen. To a newcomer one ding or scratch may be too much.
Auctions are a good venue for selling, a poor venue for buying.
I use a WWW auction site regularly. It may the one place left on earth where you can actually sell an 80's Kramer electric guitar for the couple of hundred dollars it is worth. Despite what you may think, there are equally countless numbers of people much sharper than you who are hitting those same auctions every day to buy. You'll never scoop them. By the way, the same mentality that stalks traditional auctions seems to afflict on-line auctions.