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Tips
and Tricks
for Using eBay
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Tips and Tricks for Using eBay
Search.
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.
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