Searching eBay
Here are a few golden searching rules.
Featured eBay Marketing Resource
Click the pic for more info!
-
The Ebay Marketing Group Headquarters
-
The ebay Marketing Group Are you trying to sell on ebay? Are you trying to earn money as an ebay affiliate? Do you know enough about ebay to share what you know? This Group is for you!
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 - you might find a few items here that have slipped through the cracks.
The 7 Essential Steps to Successful eBay Marketing
But this doesn't suit everyone. So, of course, there have been real books written about earning money on ebay. And here is one of the best!
The 7 Essential Steps to Successful eBay Marketing
Avg. Customer Rating: 
Amazon Price: $17.05 (as of 11/29/2009) 
Get A Thesaurus
You should try to search for all the different words that someone might use to describe an 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, you should click the 'CDs' category to look at results in that category only.
Why bother looking through a load of results that you don't care about?
Hot Selling eBay Products on the Hidden Web
See what you can find...
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.
Become an eBay Powerseller
As taught by the powersellers!
The eBay powersellers often write how-to guides about how they got where they are right now.
And they often sell them for just a couple of dollars, which is great to just download and check out.
So here are a couple featured, if you're interested:
Fetching new data from eBay now... please stand by
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.
The Hilarious eBay Song!
Made by Weird Al Yankovic
"Ebay" by Weird Al Yankovic
"I want it that way" by the Backstreet Boys is parodied by the excellent Weird Al Yankovic "Ebay" song - synched to the videoclip. I must admit Ebay is very much the way he describes it in the song. Don't take it too seriously; just enjoy! btw I actually love 'Star Wars'. Honours #5 - Most Discussed (All Time) - Australia #3 - Most Discussed (All Time) - Music - Australia #1 - Most Viewed (All Time) - Australia #1 - Most Viewed (All Time) - Music - Australia #1 - Top Favorites (All Time) - Australia #70 - Top Favorites (All Time) #1 - Top Favorites (All Time) - Music - Australia #53 - Top Favorites (All Time) - Music #22 - Top Rated (All Time) - Australia #14 - Top Rated (All Time) - Music - Australia #22 - Most Linked (All Time) - Australia #6 - Most Linked (All Time) - Music - Australia
curated content from YouTube
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.
Don't get too tied up learning the ways of the search engine!
A surprising number of eBay users don't search at all, preferring to look through eBay's category system and save their favourites in their browser.Why not check out The eBay Marketing Group for more advice on how to ensure buyers find your auction? :-)
Featured eBay Lenses:
Click the pic for more info!
-
A Beginner's Guide to eBay Auctions
-
Over the years, eBay has introduced all sorts of different auction types, in an effort to give people more options when they buy and sell their things on eBay. For every seller who doesn't like the idea that their item might sell for a far lower pric...
-
The income possibilities of eBay
-
If you've ever read a Squidoo Lens about eBay Marketing, you will have seen the kinds of incomes people make - it isn't unusual to hear of people making thousands of dollars per month on eBay. So... why not you?!
-
How to Use eBay to Grow Your Other Businesses
-
Most of the people who make money from eBay don't actually make all of that money on eBay. There are all sorts of ways you can use eBay to give your existing businesses a helping hand.
-
6 Simple Steps to Posting Your First eBay Auction
-
It's surprisingly simple to get started posting your very first auction on eBay. Here's what you need to do.
Did you like this lens?
Is there anything missing?
Add your own eBay search engine advice here!
-
Reply
- ebayriches ebayriches Sep 23, 2007 @ 6:02 am
- Hey! Great lens you have there on eBay searches. Highly recommended! :) I have just set up a lens on how one can generate massive income using eBay at http://www.squidoo.com/ebayriches. You might want to check it out when you're free. :)
by Skills
Hello! Thank you for reading my lens. I hope you found it both informative and enjoyable.
I am making one million Squidoo lenses, and you can read my...
(more)Explore related pages
10 Steps To Successful Selling On eBay- So you want to be a successful seller with your own eBay business, do you? Here'...
SafeHarbor: The eBay Police- SafeHarbor are the eBay police department. If you break the rules, commit fraud...
Watch Out For eBay Scams (especially THESE ones!)- There aren't that many scammers on eBay - but the ones there are tend to be gree...
eBay - Part Time or Full?- Going full-time as an eBay seller is living the dream: making a real income, wor...
10 Ways to Kill Your eBay Business- It's surprisingly easy to kill your eBay business, if you're not careful - sure,...
A Beginner's Guide to eBay Auctions- Over the years, eBay has introduced all sorts of different auction types, in an...
