Reading the Reviews and Guides

Not sure whether a particular CD is to your tastes? Then read the reviews before you buy. Don't know which PC games are best for your particular game system? Then look for a Guide on buying PC games. Your fellow eBay members are not short of opinions; use those opinions (and their experience) to your advantage.

All of eBay's Reviews and Guides are centralized at the Reviews & Guides page (reviews.ebay.com), shown in Figure 4.1. Finding what you want is relatively easy; you can browse through all available Reviews and Guides by category, or search for specific offerings.

Figure 4.1. The main page for eBay's Reviews & Guides.

Browsing and Searching the Product Reviews

eBay's product reviewswritten by your fellow eBay usersprovide a great way to learn more about how specific products are received in the real world. eBay hosts tens of thousands of these reviews, which are organized into major product categories. You can browse through all the reviews in a given category, or search for specific reviews across all categories.

To browse through the reviews, scroll to the bottom of the Reviews & Guides page and click the appropriate category heading. Within each major category, as shown in Figure 4.2, products are further organized into appropriate subcategories. Depending on the category, there may be additional levels of subcategories; just keep clicking until you get to the list of products you're looking for. From there, click the heading for a specific product to read the available reviews.

Figure 4.2. Browsing the product reviews in a particular category.

To search for a review of a specific product, enter the name of the product (or appropriate keywords) into the search box at the top of the Reviews & Guides page. Then pull down the Reviews & Guides list and select Reviews; click the Search button and all matching reviews will be displayed.

Caution

Many products are listed in the Reviews database, even though no reviews are yet available for the item. If you come across an item with the note to "Be the first to review it!", that means that no reviews exist yet for that item.

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).

Figure 4.3. Reading all the reviews for a product.

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.