SolveYourProblem
Article Series:
Start
An eBay Business
Understanding
the eBay Search Engine
by Jeff Cohen
If you know what you’re doing, you can quickly
find what you’re looking for on eBay – and the more you know
about how buyers find you, the easier you’ll find it to be
found. Here are a few golden searching rules.
Be
specific: If you’re searching for the first edition of
the original Harry Potter book, you’ll get further searching
for ‘harry potter rowling philosopher’s stone first edition’
than you will searching for ‘harry potter’. You’ll get fewer
results, but the ones you do get will be far more relevant.
Spell
wrongly: It’s a sad fact that many of the sellers on
eBay just can’t spell. Whatever you’re looking for, try thinking
of a few common misspellings – you might find a few items here
that have slipped through the cracks.
Get
a thesaurus: You should try to search for all the different
words that someone might use to describe an item, for example
searching for both ‘TV’ and ‘television’, or for ‘phone’, ‘mobile’
and ‘cellphone’. Where you can, though, leave off the type
of item altogether and search by things like brand and model.
Use
the categories: Whenever you search, you’ll notice a list
of categories at the side of your search results. If you just
searched for the name of a CD, you should click the ‘CDs’ category
to look at results in that category only. Why bother looking
through a load of results that you don’t care about?
Don’t
be afraid to browse: Once you’ve found the category
that items you like seem to be in, why not click ‘Browse’ and
take a look through the whole category? You might be surprised
by what you find.
Few people realise just how powerful eBay’s search engine
is – a few symbols here and there and it’ll work wonders for
you.
Wildcard
searches: You can put an asterisk (*) into a search
phrase when you want to say ‘anything can go here’. For example,
if you wanted to search for a 1950s car, you could search for
‘car 195*’. 195* will show results from any year in the 1950s.
In
this order: If
you put words in quotes ("") then
the only results shown will be ones that have all of the words
between the quote marks. For example, searching for “Lord of
the Rings” won’t give you any results that say, for example
“Lord Robert Rings”.
Exclude
words: Put a minus, and then put any words in brackets
that you don’t want to appear in your search results. For example:
“Pulp Fiction” –(poster,photo) will find items related to Pulp
Fiction but not posters or photos.
Either/or: If you want to search for lots of words at once,
just put them in brackets: the TV example from earlier could
become ‘(TV,television)’, which would find items with either
word.
Don’t
get too tied up learning the ways of the search engine, though:
a surprising number of eBay users don’t search at all,
preferring to look through eBay’s category system and save
their favourites in their browser.
# # # # # SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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