Part III: Buying Merchandise on eBay

Searching for Items to Buy

Bidding in Online Auctions

Buying Fixed-Price Items

Paying for Your Purchaseand Waiting for It to Arrive

Protecting Yourself from Shady Sellers

Sniping to Win

Secrets of Successful Bidders

Chapter 7. Searching for Items to Buy

I N T HIS C HAPTER

Browsing or SearchingWhich One Is for You?
Browsing: The Easy (?) Way to Find Things
Searching: The Powerful Way to Find Things
Want It Now? Then Ask For It!

Let's get right down to it: eBay is the largest online shopping site on the Web, no questions asked. It's big. It's bigger than big. It's, like, really incredibly massively big. Think of the biggest thing you've ever seen, and eBay is bigger than that.

If you want to browse through the largest selection of merchandise for sale on the Internet, this is definitely the place to go.

However, eBay's size (it's big, remember?) sometimes makes it difficult to find that one item you're looking for. So how do you find that one special item among the 36 million or so items that are listed for sale on eBay on any given day?

Browsing or SearchingWhich One Is for You?

There are two main ways to locate items to bid on and buy on eBay. You can leisurely browse through eBay's thousands of categories and subcategories , or you can perform a targeted search for specific items.

Table 7.1 shows you what's good and what's bad about both browsing and searching.

Table 7.1. Browsing Versus SearchingStrengths and Weaknesses

Question	Browsing	Searching
How easy is it to do?	Easyjust click through the categories and subcategories	Not as easyyou have to enter specific keywords in a query
How quickly can you find a specific item?	Slowall that clicking takes time	Fastyou get immediate results for your query
How many items will you find?	A lotwhich may be too many	Not quite as manywhich may be just enough
Will you find the specific item you're looking for?	Not alwayssometimes items aren't categorized properly	Yesassuming the seller puts the right keywords in the listing title
Can you isolate items geographically ?	Yesyou can narrow your results by region	Yesyou can narrow your results by region
Can you find other bidders and sellers?	Nothere's no way to browse through the millions of other eBay users	YeseBay lets you search by user name

The bottom line: If you're not sure what you're looking for, or if you're looking for all types of items within a general category, you should browse. If you're looking for a specific item or type of item, you should search.

"Mike Sez"

Many eBay categories are so large they're practically unbrowsable. (Do you really want to click through a hundred pages of listings to find the item you want?) I definitely recommend searching over browsingyou'll find what you're looking for a lot faster!

Browsing: The Easy (?) Way to Find Things

eBay has an ever-increasing number of categories, listing all sorts of itemsantiques, books, coins , collectibles , comics, computers, dolls , electronics, figures, gemstones, glass, jewelry , magazines, music, photography, pottery, sports memorabilia, stamps, toys, and many, many more. To view all the items within a specific category or subcategory , you need to browse through eBay's category listings.

eBay's main categories are listed on its home page. You can also access a complete list of eBay's categories and subcategories by clicking the Buy link on the eBay Navigation Bar; this takes you to eBay's Buy hub, shown in Figure 7.1. The Buy hub lists all of eBay's major product categories, along with the major subcategories for each category.

Figure 7.1. eBay's Buy hub.

You see, to make browsing easier, eBay's major categories are divided into a hierarchy of subcategories. For example, if you click the Antiques link on the Buy hub page, you'll see a formidable list of subcategories within the Antiques major categoryAntiquities, Architectural & Garden, Asian Antiques , and a dozen more. In fact, many of eBay's subcategories have their own subcategorieswhich makes them sub-subcategories, I guess!

So when you access a main category page, like the one in Figure 7.2, you see a list of all available subcategories. Click a subcategory link, and you'll see either a list of additional subcategories or a list of available items.

Figure 7.2. A typical eBay category page.

When you finally get to the list of items within a category or subcategory, the page looks similar to the one in Figure 7.3. At the top of the page are three tabs; these tabs display All Items for sale, Auctions only, or Buy It Now items only. The first listings on the page are the Featured items (sellers pay extra for this placement); below that (or on the next page, sometimes) is the complete list of items for sale, with items ending soonest listed first.

Figure 7.3. eBay item listings.

Some listings have pictures or icons either before or after the title. If it's a picture, great; that means the listing has an accompanying photograph. Same thing if you see a green Picture icon. A Gift icon indicates that the seller offers various gift services, such as gift wrap. The New icon indicates that the item has been listed within the past 24 hours. The Buy It Now icon (in the middle Bids column) indicates that the seller has chosen the Buy It Now option for this item. And the PayPal icon is displayed when the seller accepts payment via PayPal.

Table 7.2 shows the various icons you might encounter.