If you have a clear idea of what you are doing, then you shouldn’t have any problems finding what you’re looking for on eBay, the more you learn about eBay buyers search tendencies, the easer it will be for you to make your products be found, here are a few pointers that you might want to take into consideration.

Be specific: If you’re searching for the first edition of the original Harry Potter book, you’ll get further searching for ‘harry potter Rowling philosopher’s stone first edition’ than you will searching for ‘harry potter’. You’ll get fewer results, but the ones you do get will be far more relevant.

Misspellings: it’s a real reality than many of the individuals on eBay really can’t spell to well. Whatever you might be looking for, try a few common misspellings; you might be surprised to find a few products that would have otherwise slipped through the cracks.

Get a thesaurus: You should try to search for all the different words that someone might use to describe an item, for example searching for both ‘TV’ and ‘television’, or for ‘phone’, ‘mobile’ and ‘cell phone’. Where you can, though, leave off the type of item altogether and search by things like brand and model.

Utilise the eBay categories: Whenever you decide to make a search, you might also notice the category section right next to the search results. If you just search for a graphics card, then you might want to click on the ‘graphics card’ category to see further results solely in that category. Why bother looking through search results that might return products that are virtually unrelated to your search term?

Don’t be afraid to browse: Once you’ve found the category that items you like seem to be in, why not click ‘Browse’ and take a look through the whole category? You might be surprised by what you find.

Not many people are aware of how powerful the eBay search engine actually is, just a few symbols here and there and it will work with flaws for you.

Wildcard searches: You can put an asterisk (*) into a search phrase when you want to say ‘anything can go here’. For example, if you wanted to search for a 1950s car, you could search for ‘car 195*’. 195* will show results from any year in the 1950s.

In correct order: If you search on a search term and put it into quotes (”") then the results that you’ll receive are ones that have all the words that are contained in your search term. A good example of that would be searching for ‘Back to the Future’ wouldn’t give you any results that say something like ‘Back to the House’.

Exclude words: Put a minus, and then put any words in brackets that you don’t want to appear in your search results. For example: “Pulp Fiction” -(poster,photo) will find items related to Pulp Fiction but not posters or photos.

Either/or: If your interested in searching for many terms at once, then all you have to do is put them in brackets: The TV example I presented to you earlier would become ‘TV,Television’, which would return results for items using both search terms. Don’t get stressed over trying to learn every single attribute of the search engine, though there are quite a significant number of people on eBay who don’t search at all but rather prefer to look through the eBay category system and save all the URLs in their favourites list of their browser.