EBay for Dummies (19 page)
Authors: Marsha Collier
Tags: #Electronic Commerce, #Computers, #General, #E-Commerce, #Internet auctions, #Auctions - Computer network resources, #Internet, #Business & Economics, #EBay (Firm)
View all items by a single seller
Select the By Seller option in the left side Items search area in Advanced Search. This way you can see all of a single seller’s items. Follow these steps:
1. In the By Seller search field, type the eBay user ID of the person you want to learn more about.
2. If you want to see auctions that this seller has conducted in the past, select the Show Completed Listings box.
You can choose to see all current and previous auctions, as well as auctions that have ended in the last day, last two days, last week, or last two weeks.
eBay keeps past item results active for only 30 days; if you’re looking for something auctioned 31 days ago (or longer), sorry — no dice.
3. In the Sort By drop-down box, select how you want the results of your search to appear on-screen.
If you want to see the items that are closing right away, select Time: Ending Soonest.
4. Choose the number of results you want to see per page.
If the person you’re looking up has 200 auctions running, for example, you can limit the number of results to a manageable 50 listings on four separate pages.
5. Click the Search button at the bottom of the form.
Figure 5-7 shows the results page of a By Seller search.
Figure 5-7:
The results of a By Seller search.
Finding items by keywords for multiple sellers
If you’re looking for a specific item from a group of sellers, you can enter the search information in the bottom half of the By Seller Advanced Search page. You may need to perform this type of search after you settle into shopping on eBay and have several sellers that you like doing business with (or alternatively, you can exclude sellers you prefer not to do business with). With this method, you can limit the search for a particular item to just the sellers you want, rather than tens of thousands of sellers.
Free hanging chads . . .
eBay gives you the opportunity to have the same fine museum-quality items as the Smithsonian Institution. In November 2001, the Palm Beach County Board of County Commissioners found themselves in a bit of a pickle. Due to the infamous Presidential election of November 7, 2000 — fraught with hanging, pregnant, and dimpled chads — the announcement of the election winner was delayed for an unprecedented 37 days. As a result of this election, the Florida legislature outlawed the future use of punch-card voting systems — all Florida counties had to move to more stable, state-approved voting machines.
Palm Beach County chose to move to a touchscreen type of voting device, which cost its residents over $14 million. What to do with the old historic punch-card voting machines? Yep, donate one to the Smithsonian — and auction the rest off on eBay. Palm Beach County donated machine #1 to the Auction for America; it netted $4,550.01 for the Twin Towers fund.
The rest? Well, the Palm Beach County folks should have read this book. They ran a Dutch auction for 3,055 of the basic voting packages, with a starting bid of $300. Included with the voting machine was the iniquitous “butterfly ballot” with official stylus; a brass plaque certifying that it was used in the November 7 election; a Certificate of Authenticity signed by Theresa LePore, Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections; 25 demonstrator punch cards for playing polling place at home; a signed photograph of the folks in charge of recounting the ballots: Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore, Palm Beach County Commissioner Carol Roberts, and Judge Charles Burton; and “any chads which are in the machine from previous elections.” What a package! There also were 569 Premier packages, which included an Official Ballot box, starting at $600.
In the 10-day auctions (run at the same time!), Palm Beach County sold 78 of the Premier packages and 389 of the Basic voting-machine packages. I called the County Commissioner’s office to find out why my voting machine hadn’t arrived and asked when the rest would be auctioned. I was assured they would be put back up on eBay auction, but at a higher starting bid.
Palm Beach County should have followed the strategies in this book, like some smart eBay sellers did. Soon after, one of the basic packages sold after a 7-day auction for $670. Other entrepreneurial sellers have been selling voting machines from counties other than Palm Beach on eBay. Unfortunately for those who purchase them, only the Palm Beach County machines had the infamous, butterfly ballot.
When you find a seller who you want to continue doing business with, you can add his or her link to your My eBay Saved Sellers area. Just click a link to Watch This Item on the item page. It will then appear on your My eBay page, in the Organize, Saved Sellers area. You can add up to 100 sellers in this area, and can search their sales with a click of your mouse!
A bidder search
The Bidder search option is unique because sellers and buyers alike use it when an auction is going on to figure out their best strategies. After all, money is the name of the game. For information on conducting a Bidder search, take a look at Chapter 7.
Shortcuts for a Quick eBay search
After you become familiar with each of eBay’s search options, you need a crash course in what words to type into those nice little boxes. Too little information and you may not find your item. Too much and you’re overwhelmed with information. If you’re really into bean-bag toys, for example, you may be looking for Ty’s Tabasco the Bull. But if you just search for
Tabasco,
you’ll get swamped with results ranging from hot sauce to advertisements.
Some simple tricks can help narrow your eBay search results when you’re searching from pages other than the main Search page (where you don’t find all the searching bells and whistles). Table 5-2 has the details.
Table 5-2 Symbols and Keywords for Conducting Searches with the eBay Search Engine | ||
Symbol | Effect on Search | Example |
No symbol, multiple words | Returns auctions with all included words in the title. | reagan letter |
Quotes “” | Limits the search to items with the exact phrase inside the quotes. | “Wonder Woman” |
Asterisk * | Serves as a wild card. | budd* |
Separating comma without spaces (a,b) | Finds items related to either the item before or after the comma. | (gi joe,g.i. joe) |
Minus sign – | Excludes results with the word after the –. | Type |
Minus symbol and parentheses | Searches for auctions with words before the parentheses but excludes words inside the parentheses. | midge –(skipper,barbie) |
Parentheses | Searches for both versions of the word in parentheses. | political (pin,pins) |
Here are additional tips to help you narrow any eBay search:
Don’t worry about capitalization:
You can capitalize proper names or leave them lowercase; the search engine doesn’t care.
Don’t use
and, a, an, or,
or
the
:
Called
noise words
in search lingo, these words are interpreted as part of your search. So if you want to find something from
The Sound of Music
and you type
the sound of music
, you may not get any results. Most sellers drop noise words from the beginning of an item title when they list it, just as libraries drop noise words when they alphabetize books. So make your search for
sound music
. An even more precise search would be
“sound of music”
(in quotes).
Search within specific categories:
This type of search narrows your results because you search only one niche of eBay — just the specific area you want. For example, if you want to find Tabasco the Bull, start at the home page and, under the Categories heading, click Toys and Bean Bag. The only problem with searching in a specific category is that sometimes an item can be in more than one place. For example, if you’re searching for a Mickey Mouse infant snuggly in the Disney category, you may miss it because the item might be listed in infant wear. It’s best not to limit yourself to a category because some of the best deals are miscategorized by sellers. What makes them such a good deal is that not everyone can find them. But you know better.
Use the asterisk symbol often to locate misspellings. I’ve often found some great deals by finding items incorrectly posted by the sellers. Here are a few examples:
Rodri*
In this search I look for items by the famous Cajun artist
George Rodrigue.
His Blue Dog paintings are world-renowned and very valuable. By using this search, I managed to purchase a signed Blue Dog lithograph for under $200. (I resold it on eBay later that year for $900!)
Alumi* tree
Remember the old aluminum Christmas trees from the ’60s? They’ve had quite a resurgence in popularity these days. You can buy these “antiques” in stores for hundreds of dollars . . . or you can buy one on eBay for half the price. You can find them even cheaper if the seller can’t spell
aluminum
. . . .
Cemet* plot
If you’re looking for that final place to retire, eBay has some great deals. Unfortunately, sellers haven’t narrowed down whether they want to spell it
cemetery
or
cemetary.
This search will find both.
After studying these examples, I’m sure you can think of many more instances in which your use of the asterisk can help you find the deals. Be sure to e-mail me and let me know when you find something special in this way!
Finding eBay Members: The Gang’s All Here
With millions of eBay users on the loose, you may think tracking folks down is hard. Nope. eBay’s powerful search engine kicks into high gear to help you find other eBay members in seconds.
Here’s how to find people or get info on them from eBay: