Using EBay To Get The Best Deals

eBay is a fantastic tool for buying and selling of virtually anything. It is a membership site but you can look around at everything available as a guest. Once you have had a good look around the site and decided that you are interested in joining EBay it is quite a straight forward process.

Please note that you have to join before you can bid to buy anything and before you can place an auction to sell anything.

To join EBay you need to choose a unique user name, set a password and register a credit or debit card with them.

The reason for this is twofold, it helps eBay to identify you as a real person and it also provides them with your ability to pay any bills you incur.

The charges for eBay useage are all listed on the site. If you are the buyer (ie the winner of someone else’s auction) then you do not incur charges. However you must remember that you have to add the quoted postage and packing costs to your final bid.

If you purchase more than one item from the same seller they can sometimes offer you discounted postage rates as they can send your items in one package. This is not guaranteed though.

If you decide to sell an item on EBay then you need to consider a few things before you start. Firstly you need to decide how much you want to sell the item for, what is the minimum price you will allow this to sell for?

You must also decide how long you want the auction to run, whether you want to place a reserve price on the auction, what starting price you want, whether you want someone to be able to “Buy Now” if they offer a particular price and finally whether you want to upload an image picture of your goods.

The only guidance I can offer at this point is from my own experience. I find that you should always submit a scan or photograph of your item, the first image is free.

I never have a reserve price as I always start my auctions at the minimum price I am willing to accept. The starting price of the auction sets the initial fee, there are other fees listed on the site but the only main fee afterward is the final selling fee and that is a percentage of the final selling price.

I always set my auction to run the full 10days because I feel it allows more people to see the auction. However if I am in a rush to sell something, maybe it is concert tickets I can’t attend or something similar then I would fix the time at maybe 3 days and also put a “Buy Now” on the auction. The “Buy Now” feature costs extra also.

On eBay there are many facilities to help you search for the goods you want and also to upload your auctions. The main things that help to search are the eBay search engines.

In these you can look for any item that you want to buy or even maybe look at items you are selling to see how others have listed them or if they have any bids. eBay also offers an uploader system.

This will help if you are a Power Seller and want to sell hundreds of items all the time. There is also a feature that helps you when buying. This is an auto bidder. This enables you to tell eBay what is the highest amount you are willing to pay for the goods you are bidding on.

You only bid the minimum initially but if someone else outbids you (even if you are away from your PC and don’t know you have been outbid) the auto bidder bids on your behalf up to and including the highest amount you have told it too.

If you are then outbid it stops bidding until you change the limit it can go to. If in the meantime the auction closes then the other person wins and this time you have been outbid.

There are other tools available to help to Spot the best deals. These tools are all on a web site shown at the bottom of this article. One of the best ones is so useful on auction sites.

It allows you to find items that no-one else can find and therefore to get items at extraordinarily low prices as no-one else is bidding against you. This is called the misspelling tool.

The way this works is to use the fact that we commonly misspell everyday words in error and use it to our advantage. Say for example that you were a Paul McCartney fan and you wanted to see every item that had his name in the title.

You would then search for McCartney and the search engine would provide all the results. Just think however if the search engine could provide you with the results for McCartney, Mcartney, McCartny, Mcartny, etc etc.

Well this is what the misspelling tool does for you and until you try it you have no idea of how many good deals you are missing.

written by Jason Hobbs who has an eBay Resource site with misspelling tool Spot the best deals here

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