Five Surefire Ways to Win Auctions with Lower Bids

By Muhammad Hassan
Posted Thursday, November 25, 2004

If an item in an auction gets fewer people looking at it then it will get fewer bids and hence go for less money. So all you need to do is find these items that people are not looking at.

Each day literally thousands of items are listed on eBay. Some of these items will have mistakes in the way they are listed and will not be picked up in searches. All you need to do is find the items that are listed incorrectly and win them with lower bids.

Method 1 - item listed with spelling mistakes

Search for what you want using spelling mistakes. There are a number of ways spelling mistakes can be made, but we will look at the 4 most common here.

First, word spelt with a letter missing. For example, camera would be amera, cmera, caera, camra, camea and camer.

Second, word spelt with 2 letters swapped around. For example, camera would be acmera, cmaera, caemra, camrea and camear.

Third, key on the left of the key to be pressed is hit. For example, if 'n' is hit instead of 'm'. With camera this would lead to xamera, canera, camwra and cameea.

Fourth, key on the right of the key to be pressed is hit. For example, if 'v' is hit instead of 'c'. With camera this would lead to vamera, csmera, camrra, cameta and camers.

Obviously it would take too long to search for each misspelling. Fortunately, eBay has a search feature that is not commonly known where you can search for more than one word/phrase at the same time. Have all the words/phrases separated by commas and the whole list enclosed in brackets.

In our example above you would search for (amera, cmera, caera, camra, camea, camer) when checking for missing letters. At the time of writing this search turned up 275 results.

Method 2 - item not mentioned in the title

Always search in titles and descriptions and look for items where the search term is not in the title.

Method 3 - item listed in the incorrect category

Look in unusual categories. In the search results on the left is listed the 'Matching Categories'. Click on the unusual categories to find less visited items.

Method 4 - item ends when few users are using auction site

Look for items that finish on a weekday in the middle of the day or any day in the middle of the night. The times are those in America as most Internet users are from America.

Most bids are placed on an item when it is first listed and when it is about to end. If an item is due to end on a weekday (people at work) or in the middle of the night (people asleep) then it will receive fewer bids as there will be less people using eBay.

Method 5 - item not listed in gallery

look for items that are not listed in the gallery (no photo in the search results). Items not in the gallery generally end with lower bids than items in the gallery.

How To Find Everything You Are Looking For

Sometimes if you just search for what you want you may not get all the items that are of interest to you. Sometimes the user may mistakenly forget to put all the relevant words in the decsription and/or the title.

For example, if you want to find a Minolta camera and you search for 'Minolta camera'. Some items may have the word camera in it but not the word Minolta so you will not find them.

The way to solve this problem is first to search for a more general term on the search page. For 'Minolta camera' search for 'camera' instead of 'Minolta camera'.

In the results returned take note of the terms you do not want such as: digital, Olympus, JVC, Kodak then go back to the search page. Put the terms in the words to exclude box and make the search again.

Repeat the above until you find the items you desire. This method will find more items you want and find items that less people have looked at and so need a smaller bid to win.

About the Author
Author: Muhammad Hassan, the webmaster of the innovative free search tool at (http://lowbiditems.com). Search eBay, Yahoo and Amazon auctions from just 1 form and quickly find items with spelling errors and lower bids. Copyright (c) 2003, Muhammad Hassan. All rights reserved.