If you know what you're doing, you can quickly find what you're looking for on eBay. The more you know about how buyers find you, the easier it will be for them to find you. Here are some golden rules for searching.
If you want to find the first edition of the first Harry Potter book, you should search for "harry potter rowling philosopher's stone first edition" instead of just "harry potter." You'll get less information, but the information you do get will be much more useful.
Spell wrong: Many eBay sellers just can't spell, which is a sad fact. Regardless of what you're looking for, try to think of a few common ways to spell it wrong. You might find a few things here that got missed.
Get a thesaurus. You should try to search for all the different words someone might use to describe something, such as "TV" and "television" or "phone," "mobile phone," and "cell phone." Where you can, though, you can leave out the type of item and search by things like brand and model.
Use the categories: When you search, you'll see a list of categories to the side of your search results. If all you were looking for was the name of a CD, click the "CDs" category to only see results in that category. Why look at a bunch of results that you don't care about?
Don't be scared to look around: Once you've found the category where items you like seem to be, why not click "Browse" and look through the whole category? What you find might be a surprise.
Few people know how powerful eBay's search engine is. With just a few symbols here and there, you can make it do amazing things.
Wildcard searches: You can say "anything goes here" by putting an asterisk (*) in a search phrase. For example, you could search for "car 195*" if you wanted to find a car from the 1950s. 195* will give you results from any year in the 1950s.
When you put words between quotes (""), only results that have all of the words between the quotes will be shown. For instance, if you search for "Lord of the Rings," you won't get any results for "Lord Robert Rings."
Exclude words: Put a minus sign and any words you don't want to show up in your search results between brackets. For example, "Pulp Fiction" (poster, photo) will find things about Pulp Fiction, but not posters or photos.
Either/or: If you want to search for a lot of words at once, just put them in brackets. For example, the TV example from earlier could become "(TV,television)," which would find items with either word.
Don't spend too much time learning how to use the search engine, though. A surprising number of eBay users don't search at all; they prefer to look through eBay's categories and save their favourites in their browser. In the next email, you'll learn how to make sure that these people can also find you.
