How to Buy on eBay
eBay is HUGE! Anyone who hasn't yet heard of eBay is someone who is shut out from all media. Yet, despite its popularity and reputation for being THE place to find anything, the majority of the population probably has never purchased anything on eBay, being intimidated. If you don't know how to effectively narrow down your search, you might feel like you are searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. But this is unncessary. Here, I will give you the bare bones of how to use eBay to buy or sell. (If you are wanting to further expand your knowledge to use all the tools that eBay offers, there are some excellent e-books to teach you what you are wanting to know.)
1. Firstly, there's an eBay for many different countries. If you are in Canada, you might want to start with eBay.ca to keep things simple. You don't need to set up an eBay account to test it out and see if it holds that special thingamabob that you are looking for. Once you find what you're looking for, you can click on the link that says "Watch This Item" and it will be put into your "My eBay" file. eBay now allows guests to put up to 20? Items in their file.
2. To find what you are looking for, you can narrow down your search by typing in something very specific, or by using the menu that appears on the left. Firstly, start out by being more specific. Instead of typing in "baby gap sweater", try typing "baby gap sweater 2 pink", if you are looking for a pink sweater that is size 2. If you are looking for a cotton sweater, it may not specify "cotton" in many titles, but chances are good that some descriptions will have "cotton" in it and if you click on "search titles and descriptions", under the search box, you will pull up these listings. Another way that you can narrow down your search is to exclude some items right in your search box. Let's say that you are looking for a watercolour painting and you know that you don't want nude art. You could type "watercolour painting -nude" and it will leave out anything that has "nude" in the title. (This is actually a really useful tip when searching in any search engine, like Google. If you want to find beads for making jewelry but don't want anything plastic you can type
Beads jewelry making -plastic
If you add quotation marks around your text, it will search for that exact wording in all the websites out there. For example,
"Oscar the Grouch" will bring up that Oscar while
Oscar the grouch (without the quotes)
Just may bring up some blog written by a woman who is grouchy that her cat, Oscar, peed on her bed again.
3. Once you find what you are looking for, you need to have an account to bid. eBay sells in five ways:
- Auction bidding, where the final price is completely out of the seller's hands;
- Reserve pricing, where the seller puts a reserve price on her item meaning that it is the minimum amount at which she is willing to sell (if your bid doesn't meet this minimum, you are under no obligation to buy and the seller has no obligation to sell, but can choose to sell it to you at that price if you both agree);
- BIN auctions (Buy It Now), where the price is set and if you want the item, you have to pay that price and once you snatch it up, no one can scoop it from you;
- Best Offer bidding, where you offer the most that you are willing to pay, in a private offer, and that seller has approximately 2 days to review your offer and respond to it. Once you submit your best offer on an item, you can't offer again on that same item, if your first offer is rejected.
- Second Chance Offers. If you bid on something and lose and the winning bidder backs out, or the seller has a second item, identical to the one that you bid on, the seller will possibly offer you the item at the ammount that you finished your bidding at.
Now, if you try to buy on eBay the traditional way by putting in a bid and hoping that no one outbids you, you are most likely going to be disappointed. That is, if anyone else is eyeing your thingamajig. Because there are people who keep track of when these listings are going to end they sit at their computer waiting until the last 5 seconds and they outbid.
Fortunately, for you, if you have better things to do, there are some programs that will do this "snipper" bidding for you. One of them is BiddingScheduler. It is free and you don't even need to download any software. So, you put your maximum bid and it will bid in the last few seconds for you.
You may wonder why that would be any different than putting in your maximum bid and letting eBay do the bidding for you. Well, because people will spend more than they had originally intended, for competition's sake. They caught up in the whole bidding frenzy that it's no longer just about the item: it's about the experience. The high. (Remember, there's all sorts in this world!) So, they will outbid your proxy bid way before the end of the auction, even if it is more than they were intending on spending. There is benefit to letting them think they are going to win until the last few seconds when your real bid kicks in using JustSnipe.
So, you win the item. Hooray! Kinda fun, isn't it? Now you have to pay. Well, most sellers accept PayPal and the rule now is that if you say that you accept PayPal, you have to accept ALL methods: balance transfers, credit cards, e-cheques, debit transfers. This is the easiest way to pay but if you are not good at managing your money, you might want to only bid on items whose sellers accept money orders. So, if you have to get a money order every time, you will be less likely to run yourself into the ground with eBay debt.
So, when you go to "My eBay", on the left under "All Buying" you will see the category "Won". There you will find all your won auctions and you'll see a little button to click to pay for them. eBay finally, a couple of years ago, found a way to let you pay for all items at once. So, when you go to click on one item, it will bring up all of your outstanding items and you can pay for them all at once.
Make sure that you review the shipping and that all is correct. When you click through to pay, it will open up your PayPal account where, after entering your password, you can pay for all of your items at once, even giving unique instructions for each transaction, if you'd like.
