How To Know The Market Going Rate
The first thing most people will want to know when buying an item is "What Is A Good Price".
Many people may know how much the item is in the shops but don't know how much they should be paying when they are buying the item on eBay or another auction site. For a start the item may be second hand but generally speaking how can you know what the going rate is for an auction?
Well there is actually a very clever way to find out EXACTLY how much you should be paying for an item on a particular site. The way to do this is to simple:
- Enter the item you require in the search box
- Click advanced at the far right of the screen next to the "search button".
- You will see a tick box labelled "Completed Listings" Check this box and hit enter
You will now be faced with a stream of SOLD items so you can see exactly how much people have been paying for the item you are looking for - no guess work needed! The red prices indicate no-one bought the item, green prices means the item was successfully sold.
How To Avoid Fraud?
Although eBay is a VERY safe place to buy online (fraud is involved in less than 1 percent of auctions) people do get scammed every day. There are many different tricks and methods fraudsters use and some items have far more cases of fraud than others.
One universal way to combat most methods of fraud is very simple: Use Paypal.
For those that don't know, PayPal is the most popular payment system on the planet. It is very easy to use and means that you are fully covered by eBays "Buyer Protection Scheme".
Not only this but it means you are not using your credit card details all of the time. You sign up with PayPal, enter your credit card details ONCE and then you can pay through PayPal and never use your card details again.
Using PayPal is a must for any online transaction especially on an auction site like eBay.
One Method To Find Ridiculous Bargains!
This next method is the most similar to the material we have in the course. This method is a very sneaky, very effective way to get absolute steals from eBay.
When you list an item for sale on eBay, you set a starting bid and you can also set a "Buy It Now" price. This option means that people can bypass the auction process and simply buy the item immediately.
The thing is that many people who list items on eBay don't know the value of the item they are listing. They then set a "Buy It Now" price that is ridiculously low and someone will come along and buy the item at a great price.
There is a way of course to make sure that person is you!
Firstly you need to make sure know how much you want to pay for the item - get a good idea of the market. Using the first tip on this page is one way to do this.
Then you need to search for item using the search box.
Now all you need to do is click the "Buy It Now" tab at the top of the listings and then sort the listings by "Time - Newly Listed".
Thats it, you now have all of the Buy It Now items that have just been listed so you can scroll through at your leisure and see if there are any bargains.
A variation of this trick is to use the categories instead of searching directly for your item. This broadens the search and throws up more items for you to scroll through, hugely increasing your chances of finding that bargain.
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