How I Cheat eBay to Win Cheap Auctions

Want an iPhone for $100? Now you can find one.

Selling on eBay is a very common skill, and one some people find worth paying other sellers up to 15% for. Buying on eBay, however, I feel is largely a neglected art.

Multiple strategies have received large amounts of publicity recently about auction sniping, or bidding on an auction with seconds to go in order to not give competing buyers a chance to outbid you. This is a good strategy and a good way to save money, especially when using automated bidding programs, but I consider this the “novice” level of eBay money-saving techniques.

I won’t reveal all of the tricks I use, but here’s one. I call it “overgeneralized auction buying.”

To understand it we have to understand a bit of how eBay works. eBay’s “search engine” is very, very simple – based completely on the “item title.” So when I search eBay for “30GB Apple iPod” the only results that will show are those that have the key terms “30GB” AND “Apple” AND “iPod.” Common knowledge says if you want to find a more exact result you add more terms, thereby specifying what you are looking for. Good eBay sellers’ titles are generally not much more than a list of key terms customers might be using to search for when looking for their item.

Common economic knowledge says that the more views there are on an item the higher the price will be. We won’t take time to explain here how in a market-based bidding economy such as eBay such a law operates, but if it’s not common sense simply accept that as more people see an item more people bid on said item, therefore the price goes up.

So according to that principle, what we are looking for if we want to find a cheap auction are auctions that nobody else has been able to find. Some have suggested searching for misspellings, and even developed programs that search for misspellings, but such occurrences are few and far between in my experience. Now those of you that have earned the right of passage by reading this whole  article up until now will be able to understand what I consider the “holy grail” of eBay shopping, step-by-step.

1. Search for something in vague terms. For this example, we’ll use the term “Iphone.” (although note that trying a term such as “i phone” with a space might be another good option here, since fewer people search for it as two words). When I do this I see 379,002 results. Everything that has the word “Iphone” in the title is showing up. Being used to search engines makes us want to be more specific, but consider this: What if some seller had listed their product as simply “Iphone” with no other descriptive information. How would you find it? You would have to look through all 379,002 auctions to find it. But there’s a better way.
2. Begin minusing out terms that don’t apply to what you’re looking for. There are thousands and thousands of iphone accessories on eBay. eBay’s search allows us to “minus out” search terms, or in other words if I search for “iphone -headphones” (with no space in-between the – and the term “headphones”) all of the auctions that have the word “headphones” in the title will disappear. So instead of narrowing the results by being more specific, we’re going to narrow results by eliminating other terms. Note that we probably want to minus out even “good” terms that would describe our item, since some terms would be too easily found by other buyers. Ideally we’re looking for an auction whose title is simply “iphone” or “i phone.” So here’s a not perfectly done sample search (eBay only allows a certain number of characters for the search, so I get as many as I can and then scroll. This is far from the best search I’ve done, but I’m not giving you all of the best ones)
   “iphone” -3gs -4 -2g -case -headphones -charger -car -fm -adapter -battery -unlocked -broken -speaker -replacement -screen -16gb -3g -cable -cord -ipad -stylus -av -earphone -headphone -scale -headset -pick -tool -stereo -”ear phone” -”head phone” -remote -mic -skin -bobblehead -service -1st -keyboard -8gb -16gb -32gb -1 -sticky -sticker -silicone -earbuds -clock -dock -timer
3. Scroll through remaining auctions (I set settings to view 200 at a time, and usually will just search for 1 days worth each day). You can even buy something and turn around and sell it once it comes. That got me through High School with no job.

Good luck with that one, and happy bidding. I’ll post the results of the auctions I’ve found later

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