How to Find Deals on eBay
By ryan ~ March 3rd, 2008. Filed under: websites.
eBay can be magical place if you want it to be. For most people eBay can be overwhelming when searching for deals.
I was recently in the market for a laptop that I was going to buy for a friend. She didn’t want to spend over $200. As of right now there are 19,000+ laptops under that category on eBay. Of those, there are 10,000+ under $200!! No way was I going to search through all 10,000 laptops in order to find one that I liked. Odds are that the ones that are in my price range now are going to spike in the last 30 minutes of the auction anyway.
So, here are some things I tried in order to find a deal on eBay.
First, I set my standards based on the price I was willing to pay. I figure for $200 I should be able to get a low Pentium 4 or a high Pentium III with everything, except the battery (buying a laptop on eBay with a good battery is extremely rare).
Once I set my standard, I began to search for misspelled auctions; i.e. labtop -laptop, “note book” -notebook, lap top -laptop and so on. I didn’t find anything worth while this time.
Next, I tried searching auctions that are close to ending so that I might try to snipe one at the last second. Again, no luck.
Finally, I tried searching the Buy it Now’s, starting at the most recently listed. There were some pretty good deals but none that really felt was worth it. I decided to take a break for a few hours and try again later that night. I later searched again and found a Pentium III, 1Ghz with 256mb RAM, DVD player, 40Gb hard drive and a bad battery for $99. This was well within my price range and it was listed only 2 hours prior, so I bought it.
The laptop I bought turned out to be a great deal as everything worked well. I later bought a battery for $50 to complete the laptop for my friend. It’s a nice Pentium III laptop for about $150, not too bad!
The moral of this story is to think outside the box and be patient. There are some people who are willing to sacrifice more money because they need it NOW! Items get listed all the time on eBay, if you don’t see what you want then be patient and wait it out until a good deal becomes available.