Creating Advanced and Ongoing Searches on ebay

These pointers are geared towards ongoing searches for comic books, but can easily be adapted for other areas.

If you're a collector, trader or dealer, you'll want to find ways to sort thru the millions of offerings on eBay. Simple searches get you started, but there are much better ways to spend your time. Some suggest that you start with very specific searches, such as

comics CGC DC 1936

and to use only title search.

These hints will work in some cases - specifically, those where you are looking for single copies, and the seller has thought of the same keywords as you. But with a limit in title length, words like CGC or 'coverless' may not appear in the title; many sellers specifically dont put the condition in the title in order to be able to describe their item in more detail later. And newer sellers may be using what they think are attractors like "WoW' and "Rare" instead of more accurate descriptions.

Re auction price, that can be misleading, too - the item may be a lot of 10 or 100 [sometimes with a few issues that make the entire lot worth looking at].

So, start with the broadest search you can, and then narrow it. use the minus feature to eliminate listings you you dont want to see. Eg, you can use -marvel if your superhero DC search brings up too many Marvel auctions [knowing that you'll miss auctions that have both!]

eBay is a game - and part of that game is discovering great deals that for whatever reason no one else finds - so you want your search to turn up auctions that all your other bidding friends never find. [that's why i usually leave the worldwide setting on - especially for comics, international shipping is reasonable enough that you'l find bargains here because most ebayers aren't even looking.]

Use the 'favorites' option when you find a search that works - click on add favorites and you can store this search. You can always call it up later, refine it, and store the new search under a different name. You can have ebay email you whenever there are items that fit your search. This way you can quickly browse dozens of listings in email without having to search for them individually.

After you've created your searches, set them up to automatically email you when there are new items. Some searches will arrive every day [the email only contains links to the first 20 items, to keep the size down, but has a direct link to the full search]. Large search results can be refined further. Eg I started with
("Classics Illustrated", "Classic Comi*")

This will find all items with variant spellings of either 'Classics Illustrated" or "Classic Comic" or "Classic Comics". Today, this search had about 1100 listings. Some of them found auctions where sellers used 'classic comic' as a description rather than a title, but that's ok. When i have time, i can browse these. But if i'm looking for larger collections, i can refine the search by telling it to look for

"Items listed as lots, Listings with at least 10 items"

This search finds just 3 auctions, and i'm interested in all of them. So I save this search too - now, when i have time, I can search the broad listings, looking for items my tighter searches have missed [eg, the second search wont find lots of 10 or more unless the seller has specifically used the 'lot' feature whe they set up the listing. But i look at the tighter search every day - 3 items rather than 1000.