I think the best wayt to find out if e-bay is for you is to pick a single item around your house and try and sell it. That's what I did. I carefully looked at the listings for items simular to what I wanted to sell to get an idea of how to word my listing and what kind of policies other sellers had. I created my e-bay and paypal accounts, then very slowly and carefully set up my auction. I read the whole page each step of the way when building my auction and made sure I understood everything. Even after listing I went back to revise it (you're allowed to do this) several times until I got it exactly the way I wanted it.
After a couple of listings I got the hang of it, and while I don't list things often, I'm now comfortable with selling.
As for shiping, I us USPS priority. I feel it's the easist way to do shiping, and buyers like that they get their items in less than a week. You can do delivery confirmation which makes e-bay/paypal happy and makes the buyer happy since they can track their own item. It's very easy. When you are making your listing, weigh the item to get it's exact weight (packaged and ready to ship, remember the box and packaging material count towards the total shiping weight. I have a digital food scale I use for weighing). I put the "Shiping Calculator" feature in my listing. When you do that, you enter the weight of the package, how much (if anything) you want to charge for a handleing fee (I charge $1) and the shiping options you want to give your buyers (you can offer them everything or just one or two options). Then when you listing goes live, the buyers can just type their zip code and the calculator tells them what it will cost to ship the item to their address with the option they chose. When they win the auction, the correct shiping cost is included in the e-bay generated invoice. I think this is the best way to do it because you never have to worry about under-estimating the shiping cost and have that eat in to your profits from the sale, or over estimating the shiping and have buyers not bid on your item due to excesive shiping costs.