My Favourite Ebay Auction Search

To find the real buying opportunities on eBay a little thought and technique can be used to obtain the some excellent results. Simply going to eBay.com and typing in a keyword will work, but not as well as it could do, and you will need to browse thru a lot of listings to spot the bargains.

As time allows I too like to browse eBay looking for a bargain to buy. Most people go about this by focusing on a category that they think may interest them and simply browse each auction that is nearing its end time. Others search within a category by keyword in the title. Others extend this to the title and description.

Although I may be browsing for nothing in particular, if I see a nice item at potentially a really cheap price, I'm going to be interested. What category? I don't know! There is a great deal you can do to refine an eBay search and, as an example, I will explain one of my favourite searches that has rewarded me with some fabulous bargains.

This is my first eBay search most days Click here for new window. Did you see anything you like? Was it cheap? Now I will explain how that eBay search was done.

First it searched every category of eBay. As I don't know what I'm looking for, it makes sense not to limit the categories. Next I made it search for eBay items available to the US rather than just located in the US. You don't know if someone in Australia is selling a rare US stamp that he doesn't realise the value of! I set a limit to the current bid price to limit the returns. The lower the price the fewer items get returned by the search. This eBay search works on $2. I also limit the search results returned by eBay to only viewing listings that end within 12 hours. Shorten this time frame and you obviously return less items to browse. The keywords I used to search with are 1c, 99c, NR & reserve. By placing those keywords in barackets within the search box, eBay returns item listings with any one of these terms in the title. The logic of is that, if a seller places one of those terms in the title, it suggests they are starting the auction at a very low bid and looking for a bidding war to help it reach a much better price. But very often bidders overlook an item and it can sell very cheap! Perhaps to you?

This search alone will usually return a lot of items that I'm not interested in such as eBooks. So I make sure these are excluded from the results by placing the terms -eBook -eBooks -guide -download -info & -catalogue after the bracketed keywords in the search box. Notice the minus sign before each word. This tells eBay not to return any items that have that word in the title. Simple and effective and the vast majority of eBay browsers don't do it!

Hopefully you now understand a few of the more advanced search techniques on eBay that can reward you with bargain priced finds! If you look at the search page I liked to again you will see the search terms in the box in the top left hand corner of the screen. Why not experiement to see what bargains you can find?

The author is a moderator at Pheebay Forums.