Taming the eBay Search Engine
If you know what you're doing, you can quickly find what
you're looking for on eBay - and the more you know about how
buyers find you, the easier you'll find it to be found. Here
are a few golden searching 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 - you might find
a few items here that have slipped through the cracks.
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?
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.
Don't get too tied up learning the ways of the search
engine, though: 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. The next email will
show you how to make sure these people can find you too.
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