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If there are other aggrieved buyers, you should email them all, get together and contact trading standards as a group. A criminal investigation is much more likely when several victims are involved. Admittedly, it's doubtful that a prosecution will directly result in compensation for consumers, but Trading Standards will assist you in pursuing your claim through the small claims court.

Alternatively, if your seller uses a personalised domain name, their postal address may be in the DNS records. A free domain name look-up service such as www.who.is can give you access to this information. However, individual users can have their postal details removed from the records, or may simply provide a dummy address. In my case, the seller used several emails, all of them on large domains and ISPs such as Google Mail and AOL, which are pretty much untraceable for the layman. However, his account name for one of the addresses looked as if it might be the name of a company. I Googled it and discovered that, yes, it was some sort of recruitment consultancy and it was based in Glasgow, the city from which my seller registered his presence with eBay.

From here, I headed to the website of Companies House (www.companieshouse.gov.uk), which stores information on every limited company in the UK. If you click on WebCheck you can do a quick free search for basic information, including a postal address.

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This is a sound course of action whenever you're dealing with an unfamiliar online retailer. If they have an address in the UK, you know you can trace them if things go wrong. Should you want to know more, you can also purchase a company's latest accounts and annual returns from the site.

The firm I checked out was not listed at Companies House, but it had its own website. I ran the URL through a domain search and found the address of the person who registered the site. The only problem was that his name didn't match my seller's. Unperturbed I entered my seller's name into 192.com, which compiles data from various sources including directory enquiries, census records and electoral rolls. And there he was; listed in the 2007 electoral roll for Glasgow, sharing a flat with the owner of the company domain name. With an address, I could take him to court and claim my money.

That's exactly what I did. As he was based in Glasgow I had to go through the Scottish Courts system (www.scotcourts.gov.uk). This is fundamentally similar to the setup in England and Wales but with myriad administrative differences. There's currently no option to begin a claim online, but you can download the relevant form to fill in (it's very short) and several PDFs offer information on the small claims process. I sent off my form with the £45 fee and a few days later I received notification of a return date (the date by which the defendant had to respond to the claim) and a preliminary hearing date.

Later, the court wrote to me again informing me that a summons had been served on my seller and that I should phone the day after the return date to find out the defendant's (or 'defender' in Scottish legal parlance) response. When I rang I discovered that the seller had admitted liability and had requested to pay within two weeks. I had the option to refuse this request and force a court hearing, or accept it and inform the court that a hearing would not be necessary. I chose the latter, if only to avoid the long journey to Glasgow.