If you know what you are doing, you can quickly find what you are looking for on eBay. Here are some golden rules.
Be specific: If you’re looking for the first edition of the original Harry Potter book, you’ll still be looking for ‘Harry Potter Rowling Philosopher Stone First Edition’ than you are looking for ‘Harry Potter’. You get fewer results, but the ones you get will be much more relevant.
Spelling Mistakes: It’s a sad fact that many sellers on eBay just can’t spell. Whatever you are looking for, try to think of some common misspellings – chances are fewer people will find these items, making them cheaper.
Get a thesaurus: You should try to find all the different words that someone can use to describe your article, for example by searching for both ‘TV’ and ‘TV’ or ‘phone’, ‘mobile phone’ and ‘mobile phone’. Where you can, however, hand out the exact type of item and look for things like make and model.
Use the categories: When you search, you will see a list of categories next to your search results. If you have just searched for the name of a CD because you want to buy that CD, click on the “CD” category to just look at the results in that category. Why bother looking through many results that you do not care about?
Do not be afraid to browse: Once you have found the category that apparently objects you like, why not click “Browse” and browse through the entire category? You may be surprised at what you find.
Few people realize how powerful the eBay search engine is – a few symbols here and there and it will work wonders for you.
Business searches: You can place an asterisk () in a search phrase when you mean “anything can go here”. For example, if you want to search for a car from the 1950s, you can search for “car 195”. 195 * will show results from any year in the 1950s.
In this order: If you put words in quotation marks (“), the only results will appear those that have all the words in quotation marks. For example, searching for” Lord of the Rings “will not give you results. Lord Robert Rings”.
Exclude words: Put a minus and then put some words in parentheses that you do not want to appear in your search results. For example: “Pulp Fiction” – a post finds objects related to Pulp Fiction but not posts or photos.
Or/or: If you want to search for many words at once, just put them in parentheses: the previous TV example could be “TV”, which would find objects with both words.
So when you found your item of good quality, bid on it, and won it, what if everything goes wrong? Don’t worry – eBay has a complete dispute resolution process, and we’ll cover it a bit in the next article, so you’re ready for the worst.
