Using eBay Search to Your Advantage - By Darren Gibson

It is relatively easy to find what you’re looking for on eBay if you know what you’re doing and follow a few simple rules.

1: Make Your Search Specific:

If you are searching for an original pressing of the Beatles’ Revolver album, you’ll get much further searching for ‘Beatles revolver original vinyl’ than you will searching for ‘beatles’ or ‘revolver’. There will be fewer results, but the ones you do get will be far more relevant to what you are actually looking for.

If you place words between quotation marks ("") 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 Dance” won’t give you any results that say, for example “Lord Charles Dance”.

If you want to exclude certain words, then put a minus (-), followed by any words that you don’t want to appear in your search results enclosed in brackets. For example: “Doctor Who” –(poster, photo) will find items related to Doctor Who but not posters or photos.

2: Use Incorrect Spelling:

It’s a sad fact that many of the sellers on eBay do not know how to 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. You can also find a useful eBay misspelling tool at www.thousands-of-bargains.com , where you can enter a single search term and it will automatically retrieve listings from eBay which include multiple misspelled variations.

3: Use Word Variations:

Get yourself a thesaurus (or use an online one) and 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. If you want to search for variations of the same words at once, just put them in brackets, hence the TV example above could become ‘(TV,television)’, which would find items containing either word.

4: Do “Wildcard” Searches:

Not many people realise the true power of eBay’s search engine – a few symbols here and there can make all the difference.

If you place an asterisk (*) into a search phrase you are effectively saying ‘anything can go here’. For example, if you wanted to search for a classic car from the1920s, you could search for ‘car 192*’. 192* will show results from any year in the 1920s.

5: Use 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 book because you want to buy that book, you should click the ‘Books’ category to just look at results in that category. Why bother looking through a load of results which are not relevant to you?

Finally, browse around a little. After you’ve found the category that the items you like seem to be in, why not click ‘Browse’ and look a little deeper into the entire category? You could be pleasantly surprised by what you find. Happy hunting!

Darren Gibson has over five years experience on eBay

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