Ebay Buying Secrets Feedback/Discussion

MSE_Martin

Thanks for all the suggestions - we will take a look and pop the good 'ens in the article

David_Harrison_2

Re: FREECYCYLE

Thanks for the mention of the freecycle network.

I am a moderator for Taunton Freecycle.

The main aim of Freecycle is to stop things ending up in landfill sites that might be of use to someone else. As you mentioned, we do ask that before a new member request items they first offer at least one item. It is a community and we therefore expect people to put something into as well as take things out of it.

One small point re the number of emails you are likely to receive. It is easy to set up the account so you get a "digest" of the last days or the last 25 messages rather than a new email for every posting. You can also chose not to receive any emails at all, but instead just read through the message board online at your leisure.

In most groups the messages are moderated to stop unsuitable / unwanted messages getting published on the site. The moderators, like myself, are all volunteers.

Hope this is of some help.

Kind regards,

David

moneypooh

ebay buying tip: learn to spell badly! don't just look for something with the correct spelling try mis-spelling and you'll grab a bargain!

teddyco

Don't you think it's rather petty to try and save money this way?

I can think of a lot of other ways to make and save money rather than wasting time
trying to take advantage of folks who mis-spelled their listings on Ebay.

auctionsearchkit

mattis2k wrote: »

Would anyone from MSE or a moderator please explain why you removed the post I wrote about Goofbay ?

Thanks
Matt
Goofbay.com

Hi Matt,

To answer your q - I had a post removed too, it seems they are taking a tough line on not allowing any advertising or self-promotion on this thread. Fair enough, agree the thread should be a discussion, not a series of adverts. But on the hand, the post I had removed was simply recommending a product relevant to the article and pointing out some of its benefits. Was being completely up-front about it & could have got a relative or friend to do the same (and then presumably it would have been legitimate?)

Sometimes the developers of tools can be well placed to give recommendations since they are familiar with the market. And on that note here's my list of recommendations (not including anything about my own website of course):

- For a sniping tool I've not found any better than Snip:

http://www.snip.pl

This is a Polish website which provides a good interface, excellent reliability (in the years I've been using it have only had a couple of missed shots) and some powerful features. E.g. "Shot Groups" (allowing muliple auctions but only win a up to a predefined set number) and "Conditional Sniping", which takes this a step further by allowing actions to be set that are dependent on whether an item is won. I think it's about 10p per shot but this is money well spent for such a reliable service and ease of use (the Firefox Extension lets you snipe at the click of a button).

- AuctionTrax provides a good range of tools including a Shill Bidding detector (or at least it used to have, couldn't see it on there today?) and a Negative Feedback finder (different to the one at toolhaus.org mentioned in the article and maybe not as useful but still worth a look):

http://auctiontrax.com/

- oSkope Visual Search is quite a neat tool for seeing item photos for a search:

http://www.oskope.com/ebay

- The eBay toolbar is quite a useful thing to have on your browser, if only for quickly linking to your My eBay page or performing an eBay search. The alerts it pops up for items ending soon can be quite useful too for those that aren't sniping:

http://pages.ebay.co.uk/ebay_toolbar/

- Get4It is quite an interesting website that plots graphs of what items have sold for recently:

http://www.get4it.co.uk

- SpaceTime is a futuristic looking 3D search that really has the "wow-factor" and allows eBay searches as well as searches in Google, Amazon, Youtube etc:

http://www.spacetime.com

- As for finding more of these tools, a great place to start is the eBay Solutions Directory, which lists all the apps that have been certified by eBay:

http://cgi6.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SolutionsDirectory&page=results&subgroup=12

P.S. Just to make it clear to the mods, I haven't got any affiliation whatsoever with any of the tools mentioned, in fact they could really be seen as competitors!

custardy

teddyco wrote: »

Don't you think it's rather petty to try and save money this way?

I can think of a lot of other ways to make and save money rather than wasting time
trying to take advantage of folks who mis-spelled their listings on Ebay.

how is it taking advantage? you search for the words they list under
ive even found them by accident myself by misstyping the search term

Cynic_2

teddyco wrote: »

Don't you think it's rather petty to try and save money this way?

I can think of a lot of other ways to make and save money rather than wasting time
trying to take advantage of folks who mis-spelled their listings on Ebay.

Listing accurately is the seller's responsibility. If they can't be bothered to spell-check then that's their loss.

I once bought, via an eBay action, what would have been an expensive item at a bargain price. The seller complained that they had failed to place a reserve pice. Tough!

I have had other bargains for sellers who clearly did not know about their item or its value. That is the glory of all auctions.

:beer:

moneypooh

teddyco wrote: »

Don't you think it's rather petty to try and save money this way?

I can think of a lot of other ways to make and save money rather than wasting time
trying to take advantage of folks who mis-spelled their listings on Ebay.

NO not at all, some words can be mis-spelt very easily. I did it once while looking for PS2 games for my son and saved £35 on 3 items. Not bad for a 2 second mis-spell! These items were from ebay shops - you'd think they would get it right.

To be fair, I did email someone who had mis-spelt something and hadn't put a reserve on a very valuable collectors item. I knew that if a bid had been placed someone could 'freeze' the auction and consequently she wouldn't have made a fair amount unless she cancelled. She was VERY pleased. The item did then go on to sell for a good market price. I'm not that mean:D

rare_stuff

collie_27 wrote: »

Favourite search emails are only sent out once a day so if an item was listed with a "Buy It Now" a few minutes after your daily email was sent you won't see it till next day when it may have sold already. It also only gives you (I think) the top ten results for your search when the one you want might be the 11th one listed today.

However, if you use a news reader like Google Reader you can set up an RSS feeds from the radar button that appears at the bottom of every search results page. The feeds publish auction listing every 3 hours giving you up to a 21 hour head start on those waiting for their email to tell them the listing is up.

Also saves your bandwidth because GReader viewed in list mode will just download the auction title rather viewing the full email with header and thumbnails so you can quickly scan as many auction results as the feed sends you not just 'Top Ten'. Additionally 'heavy' search users aren't limited to just the 100 "Favourite searches" you can save in My Ebay, you can have as many as you like.

Combining GReader with RSS feeds AND Ebays advanced search commands like wildcards will let you cast your net as wide or as narrow as you like and get the results to you ASAP.

I certainly think using RSS for your favorite search terms or if you want to keep an eye on all size 9 ladies Nike trainers for example is a great way to do it.
There's a really good 7 step tutorial for using and setting up RSS feeds here, though this tutorial is more geared at using RSS feeds for affiliate purposes the tutorial is the same for buyers, with the exception of just removing the one step in regard to adding your affiliate id which should be left blank.

savedmoney

Shouldn't this be a sticky?
And/or merged with
The Golden Rules of eBay Article Discussion Area
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=238602