Buying a bargain on Ebay

Ebay has millions of goods for sale at any one time but how do you know if the items listed are real bargains or if you could buy them cheaper elsewhere?

Price checking

Many people who use automatically assume that they are buying goods cheaper than they could buy them elsewhere and yet this is not necessarily the case especially if there are several bidders which can drive the price way over what the listed item could be bought for on an online shop or even a High Street Shop. It is therefore important if you are looking to buy a bargain to know how much shops are selling the item for so you should always do a quick price comparison using Kelkoo or Pricerunner to find the lowest price available online.

You should also do a search on eBay to find out how much similar items have sold for recently to ensure you are not paying too much. Searching for this information on eBay simply involves entering the description in the search box and marking the ‘completed items’ box.

Mispelt descriptions

Some real bargains can be found through peoples inability to spell properly as by making spelling mistakes in their descriptions can dramatically reduce the number of people who view their stuff through searching keywords on eBay. As less people view the items listed then it is likely less people will bid on the items meaning the price could be significantly lower than had the description been caredully checked for spelling errors by the seller. Online tools are available from Fatfingers and Goofbay to help you find these mispelt descriptions in order to help you bag yourself a bargain.

No bid items

Sellers often list their items with a low starting bid of 99p to encourage people to bid for the stuff they have listed but sometime no-one bids and the price remains at 99p making it a bargain. To help spot these no bid items Lastminuteauctions lists all the items listed still for sale at less than £1 meaning you can find bargains a plenty. If you are looking to find auction listings with a higher price then Auctionfinal allows you set your own minimum price and auction closing time.

Last second bids

Once you have found an item you are interested in buying you should avoid rushing in and placing a bid straightaway as other bidders will come along and bid up the price, instead you should try and wait to the last second possible before bidding. This used to mean staying online and posting your bid manually in the dying seconds of an auction but nowadays you can use auction snipers to do this for you. These allow you to enter the eBay item number and the highest price you are willing to pay and the auction snipers will then bid for you in the last few seconds of the auction to help you win the item. Goofbay has a free auction sniper but others such as Bidnip will charge you a small fee (24 cents or around 12p) which in itself could be priceless if you grab yourself a bargain.

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