Chapter 4. Researching Products with Reviews and Guides

As you can see in Figure 4.3, a typical review includes a photo of the item, a summary of important details, and a bar graph that represents the average rating of the item (on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest rating). When you scroll down the page, you'll see the individual reviews in full. Reviews by eBay's most reliable and prolific reviewers are listed first, under the heading of Top Reviews, with all other reviews listed under these, in reverse chronological order (newest first).

Some reviewers offer very detailed, very helpful reviews of the product. Others chip in with a short sentence or two. If you find a review particular helpful (or not), just click the Yes (or No) button. Your ratings of a review contribute to the rating of the reviewer; eBay's top reviewers are fond of jockeying for position among their peers.

If the reviews for a particular product are particularly convincing, eBay makes it easy for you to find one of these items to buy. At the top of each product review page is a big Buy One Like This button. Click this button and eBay automatically conducts a search for that item in its current auctions database. It's that easy!

Browsing and Searching the Guides

eBay's Guides are a bit different from its product reviews. Instead of focusing on specific products, they provide information about an entire category or activity. In fact, many of eBay's Guides don't have much if anything to do with the products being sold on eBay; many are guides to general activities or hobbies. In any case, there's some good information here, if you hunt for it.

The easiest way to hunt for that information is to browse the Guides by category. You can, as well, search for particular Guides, by using the search box at the top of the Reviews & Guides page and selecting Guides from the pull-down list. When you browse, of course, you typically get a variety of subcategories to choose from; just keep clicking through until you find the types of Guides you're looking for.

Tip

Once you find a savvy reviewer, you might want to see what else that reviewer liked . To read other reviews by a particular reviewer, click the See All Reviews By... link at the top right of any review.

When you narrow your search down to a list of specific Guides, as shown in Figure 4.4, you'll see a list of "tags" under the summary of each Guide. These are, at least in theory, the most important keywords that relate to that particular Guide. When you search the Guides, you're actually searching these tags, which are applied by the writers of each Guide.

Figure 4.4. Browsing the Guides in a given category.

When it comes down to reading the individual Guides, what you get will differ wildly from one Guide to another. Some are embarrassingly short, others quite comprehensive in their scope. Some include helpful pictures; most, like the Guide in Figure 4.5, are solely text-based.

Figure 4.5. A typical Guide.

When you find a Guide you particularly like, don't forget to click the Yes button at the bottom of the page, to indicate that it was helpful for you. If you find a Guide exceptionally unexceptional, click the No button to warn other users.

Tip

You can sort a list of Guides in a number of different ways. The default sort is by Most Helpful, as determined by user voting (via the Yes and No buttons at the bottom of each Guide). You can also sort by Least Helpful (but why would you want to?), Most Recent, and Oldest.