Some associate "cheap" with bad, like a cheap laptop is a bad laptop, but that's not always the case, if you know what to look for. Bear in mind that when sellers are selling they often use the word cheap to attract buyers, so not searching on the term "cheap" may exclude you from some of the best deals.

Take eBay.com for example, millions of people turn to the online auction giant to find great merchandise for - plain and simple - they want the same thing you want, to save as much money as they can, and I am going to show you how to do just that!

Know which laptop you want? Do your research

Before venturing into the eBay marketplace, it is important that you know what type of laptop you want, or at the very least, know which ones you don't want.  eBay has a lot of great deals and a lot of not so great deals, by looking for a particular product you are able to quickly eliminate all of the other clutter.  Before shopping on eBay, I always use the Internet to research the product that I am interested in purchasing. 

Start by visiting manufacturer websites like Dell, Sony, Toshiba etc. and getting to know what features you want on your laptop and what additional products or software those laptops may come with. As many of the laptops for sale on eBay are used and refurbished they may not come with the original accessories, so calculate that into your cost.

After you know what particular laptop you're looking for, perform a search on Google to find the best deals online, this will give you an idea of how much that particular laptop is going to cost at online retailers. By knowing the retail price of a product you are then able to compare those against the prices you will find on eBay to ensure you are getting the best deal. 

To speed this process up, you can visit some of the many price comparison sites which I have listed below for your convenience.

Some popular price comparison sites:
1. PriceGrabber
2. Cnet Shopper
3. MySimon
4. PriceScan
5. BizRate
6. PriceRunner
7. Best Price Computers
8. DealTime
9. NexTag

eBay sellers are always in a hurry to list as many items as they can in the shortest amount of time possible, for a quick turnover. It's all part of selling on eBay, or anywhere else for that matter, the more products you list, the quicker you can make a sale and the faster you turnover your merchandise. The problem with that is this: many eBay sellers don't take the time to find misspellings that may cost them a sale. By not spelling their listing title correctly, shoppers searching for, let's say, a Dell laptop may never find the product listing due to the typo.

But what this does is allow consumers like you another opportunity to save some money on your purchase. Think about it, if nobody else finds the product then they can't bid on it, which in turn means that the bids remain lower with little to no competition and you can snatch up your new laptop for a very nice price.

Now it would obviously be very difficult for anyone to manually search through millions of product listings with every wrong spelling they can think of, but it is not that difficult for a computer program. That's right! There are several programs that have been designed to find these errors for you, and the best part is, many of them are free. All you have to do is type in your search term - i.e., the particular laptop you are looking for - and hit enter; the program will begin compiling misspellings and searching eBay to show you all of the relevant results.

Here are some free programs that will help you find misspelled items on eBay

1. Auction Speller
2. Auction Intelligence
3. Fat Fingers
4. TypoTracker
5. Gumshoo
6. Bargain Checker
7. Listed Wrong
8. Low Cost Bid
9. Missing Auctions

If you have done all of your product and price research, checked for misspelled items and still have not found a cheap laptop on eBay, then it's time to let your fingers do some work. After all, nobody said finding a great deal was going to be easy. Follow the below steps to some deals:

1. Open up your web browser to the eBay homepage.

2. Scroll down on the left hand column until you find the link that says "Computers and Networking", click on it.

3. On the next page under the heading titled "Laptops, Notebooks", find the brand of laptop you are looking for and click on the link.

4. From here you can either begin an exhaustive search on all of the laptops that match that brand, or you can enter in any specific features you would like your new laptop to have in the left hand column, to narrow your results even further.

5. Scroll through the listings until you find a cheap laptop that you like.

6. Make sure you read the description fully, read it twice if you need to. If you have any questions you can contact the seller, if they don't take the time to respond to your question then don't buy from them. They are probably unreliable.

7. Once you have all of that out of the way, perform a completed listings search to see what that particular laptop has sold for on eBay in the past. To do this, make sure you are logged into your account, go to the search bar at the top of any eBay page and click on the "advanced search" link. Next enter your search criteria in the bar, select the option that says "completed listings only" and hit enter. This will show you the prices that the specified products have sold for recently. If the prices you see on a similar item are considerably lower than the one you are looking at, I would suggest waiting a day or two and see what else gets listed.

8. If you have determined that the laptop you have found is a good deal, place a bid and watch the auction to make sure that you don't get out bid. You should also know that when you place a bid, you can enter the maximum amount you are willing to pay and eBay will bid against other users for you, up to that amount.

So why did I have you manually enter in all the information, rather than just typing "Dell Laptop" in the search bar? The answer is simple, it narrows your search results, a search for "Dell laptop" will show everything sellers have listed with Dell, or laptop, in the title, which is a lot of stuff you are not going to be interested in. When looking for a deal, always narrow down your search as much as possible, so that you can just look at the products you are interested in purchasing.

Watch out for high shipping prices

This is an important note to remember when shopping on eBay. Some sellers try to make a profit on their shipping costs, this is especially true on larger items like laptop computers, for example. Some sellers offer shipping discounts if you purchase more than one item from them. If you are interested in purchasing something else along with your laptop, this may be the way to go. After all, paying high shipping costs can quickly turn your cheap laptop into an over priced product.

Another useful lens on on cheap laptops.