Where can I buy hardware in the UK and not get faulty parts?

Britton30 said:

eBay now owns PayPal and they only accept that in the US unless an arrangement is made with the seller.

Ebay purchased Paypal more than a decade ago, but I did use the Paypal insurance services a few times, recently. Maybe it does not work in some places like China, India and Pakistan because they aren't served by Paypal, but I'm pretty darn sure it does work fine for anything shipped from within the EU and US/Canada/Australia.

I would not trust any hardware from eBay though, you may get a good part or you may get some counterfeit crap.

This is a bit extreme. Only some categories of products are likely to be counterfeit (i have yet to find a counterfeit mobo/CPU/GPU/PSU/case), and strangely quite a few of them don't list paypal as a payment option and are written in broken english (or broken italian).

check the sellers' return policies, some just don't accept them, PayPal is no help with those.

Don't confuse Ebay policies with Paypal's. Paypal covers you if they sold you a used item as if it was new, or an item lacking essential parts (without mentioning it), less items than you bought, nothing at all, a defective item or a counterfeit one (just checked their rules, you can as well). The seller return policies matter in case you changed your mind, which is where paypal can do nothing.

In case there are issues, you need to act through your Paypal account before the time for doing that expires (45 days after payment, then 20 days after you notified Paypal of the issue) , using Ebay's tools is generally useless.

I am speaking from personal experience here, not going on assumptions.

As I said, I did use paypal services too, and they worked fine for stuff shipped from inside the EU.
What happened to you?