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Informative Articles

Do not Frighten Your Ebay Customers Away
There can be very few people in the English Speaking world who have not heard about eBay. The online auction site has grown at a phenomenal rate since its launch ten years ago. It now provides an opportunity for millions of people around the...

Ebay, How I nearly got tricked out of £170
I am not sure how many people have had bad experiences on Ebay, I hope not too many. I was having a great time on there until some man tried to defraud me out of £170. I had been buying and selling on Ebay for a number of months without any...

Expert Ebaying: 5 Secrets to Saving Big on Auction Sites
In more than two years of selling on Ebay there's one frustration I hear from shoppers more than anything else: "I got outbid at the last second!" If you're relatively new to the online auction world you're probably sick of bidding wars, sketchy...

Understanding Ebay Buying Tools.
eBay offers quite a few simple tools to help make your buying easier, so you don't lose track of what you're doing. Most of them are on the 'My eBay' screen - if you're logged in, you can go there just by clicking 'My eBay' on the toolbar at the top...

When And How To Cancel An Ebay Auction Early.
One day, you might decide that you want to end an auction early. Before you do, though, you should consider why you want to do it: cancelling auctions upsets buyers and upsets eBay, and there might be a better to way to get what you want. I Want...

 
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A Searching Lesson - Take advantage of eBay's searching

76 million times each day, members use eBay's search box when they're looking for items that are of interest to them.

It occurred to me that very few of these members would know how eBay's search worked. Put another way, knowing how eBay's search system operates might help you in finding bargains.

For a start, words keyed into the standard search box are only matched against auction titles, and not against the contents of auction descriptions.

eBay's searching defaults to an "all present" style of search. This means if you key in two words such as 'finding nemo', the search will return auctions where the title contains both words in any order. It won't bring back auctions if the auction title contains only one of the words.

If you want to do a search of an "either or" style, you place parentheses around the words and separate them with a comma and no spaces. So, if you key in (finding,nemo) your search will return auctions with either finding or nemo in the auction title.

Of course, with the finding nemo example, what you really want to do is find auctions where finding nemo occurs as a phrase. To do this, you place quotation


marks before and after. So, if you key in "finding nemo" your search will return auctions where the titles contain the exact phrase finding nemo.

If you're not sure of the spelling of a particular word, or if the word you want to search on is a preface with several endings, you can use an asterisk as a "wild card". For example if you're interested in a Vuitton handbag, some sellers misspell vuitton or type it in incorrectly. You could search on vui*, and this will bring back auctions with vuitton or vuiton in the title, or indeed vui followed by any other combination of letters.

These are probably the main search weapons you need to save you time, and to help you home in on the items you want to find. If you wish to explore eBay searching in even more depth, you will find a very useful description of the process here:

http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/buy/search_commands.html

About the author:

Brian McGregor is an eBay and internet entrepreneur. He recently created the 'eBay Master Class' for eBay sellers. For your free copy, please go to http://www.work winners.com/ebm-request.htm