All auctions are not equal on eBay. When you are bidding you can use this to your advantage to score some great deals on eBay. Here are my search tips to finding the best deals when I’m shopping on eBay.

1. Misspellings and Typos – These are called hidden auctions, because they won’t show up when a bidder searches for the correctly spelled term. For instance, when looking for a specific brand of clothing like Avenue I look for a seller who may have misspelled Avenue in the title to their auction. This means that the auction won’t get as much traffic and less bidding competition for me. If you go to fatfingers.com and put in the name brand that you are looking for, it will run an eBay search of every common misspelling pointing out all the hidden auctions to you.

2. Look in the descriptions as well. I once found a great boutique name brand dress by searching for the name brand and clicking the box under eBay’s search box that says “search title and description”. Because the seller didn’t include the name brand in the title, I didn’t have any bidding competition and I got the dress for $2. I just skimmed the auction titles to find one that didn’t have the name brand listed.

3. Use eBay’s search tools to narrow the field. When searching on eBay I use the tools on the left hand of the screen to narrow the field. Take advantage of these. Sometimes it can be overwhelming looking at thousands of auctions so I will put in my budget amount and look at auctions only ending in the next 24 hours to make my search more manageable. Only auctions that are currently less than my maximum amount and ending in 24 hours will show up.

There are tons of deals to be had on eBay and using these searching tips should help you weed them out and make them more available to you. Happy Searching!!