Tips And Tricks For Using Ebay Search by John Maxim
If you know what you’re doing, you can quickly find what you’re
looking for on eBay. Here are a few golden rules.
Be specific: If you’re searching for the first edition of the
original Harry Potter book, you’ll get further searching for
‘harry potter rowling philosopher’s stone first edition’ than
you will searching for ‘harry potter’. You’ll get fewer
results, but the ones you do get will be far more relevant.
Spell wrongly: It’s a sad fact that many of the sellers on eBay
just can’t spell. Whatever you’re looking for, try thinking of a
few common misspellings – the chances are that fewer people will
find these items, and so they will be cheaper.
Get a thesaurus: You should try to search for all the different
words that someone might use to describe your item, for example
searching for both ‘TV’ and ‘television’, or for ‘phone’,
‘mobile’ and ‘cellphone’. Where you can, though, leave off the
type of item altogether and search by things like brand and
model.
Use the categories: Whenever you search, you’ll notice a list
of categories at the side of your search results. If you just
searched for the name of a CD because you want to buy that CD,
you should click the ‘CDs’ category to just look at results in
that category. Why bother looking through a load of results
that you don’t care about?
Don’t be afraid to browse: Once you’ve found the category that
items you like seem to be in, why not click ‘Browse’ and take a
look through the whole category? You might be surprised by what
you find.
Few people realise just how powerful eBay’s search engine is –
a few symbols here and there and it’ll work wonders for you.
Wildcard searches: You can put an asterisk (*) into a search
phrase when you want to say ‘anything can go here’. For
example, if you wanted to search for a 1950s car, you could
search for ‘car 195*’. 195* will show results from any year in
the 1950s.
In this order: If you put words in quotes ("") then the only
results shown will be ones that have all of the words between
the quote marks. For example, searching for “Lord of the Rings”
won’t give you any results that say, for example “Lord Robert
Rings”.
Exclude words: Put a minus, and then put any words in brackets
that you don’t want to appear in your search results. For
example: “Pulp Fiction” –(poster,photo) will find items related
to Pulp Fiction but not posters or photos.
Either/or: If you want to search for lots of words at once,
just put them in brackets: the TV example from earlier could
become ‘(TV,television)’, which would find items with either
word.
So once you’ve found your bargain item, bid for it and won it,
what if it all goes wrong? Don’t worry – eBay has a thorough
dispute resolution procedure, and we’ll cover it in some depth
in the next article, so you’ll be prepared if the worst
happens.
About The Author: John is an Ebay Powerseller. He's published a
blog listing his best resources and articles. His blog can be
found at http://www.auctionblogonline.com
.