eBay Buying Tips - Autopilot Bargain Hunting

     Looking for eBay buying tips? Most of us have been to eBay at least once to shop for something that we could not find online elsewhere - eBay's great for finding the things you want and usually you can get it for a lot less than retail price.

     However, the eBay website can be extremely daunting for someone who has not had much experience with buying or selling there. There are thousand and thousands of listings up on auction every single day, and many of us just can't afford the time to sit there and sift through each one manually.

     So how do we get our searches to become as automatic as possible? Here are some eBay buying tips that many people do not know about or use very often at all. With this method you will always be able to get what you want at the lowest possible price on eBay.

     If you have out-bid on auctions at eBay before, you would have felt sad that you missed out on that great item, or even slightly annoyed at the person who won the bid. But with every failure comes a step closer to success. Here is what you can do in the future.

     Each time you lose in an auction, have a look at the bidding list and find out who the top 3 bidders were and add their usernames to your notebook. Do this several times and what you have at the end of it is a list full of people who like the same things as you do - it's not uncommon for people who share one interest to share another one as well.

     Now what you can do with this information is, you could run a bidder search on these buyers and get some further information on them. Information such as what they've been bidding on recently, the time of day that person likes to bid (which tells you pretty much which part of the world he or she is from).

     You can also note from there the exact time that person won the bid and how many times he placed a bid on the auction. This will tell you if his or her method is sniping (bidding at the very last few seconds), or constant bidding. You can use this information to your advantage when you come across the same buyer the next time you bid in an auction.

     These tools in eBay really help you "snoop" on your competition as well as save you a ton of time trying to find the best deals- why not just let others do the bargain hunting for you on autopilot? Sneaky isn't it?

Here's a quick guide on how to do a bidder search on eBay:

• In the main webpage under the navigation bar, find the "search" bar and click on it.

• You want to search "by bidder" so select that tab menu. Here is where you will want to type in the name of the username of the competing bidder.

• Hit search and you will get to that person's information screen.

• Make use of the "Include Completed Items" option to check out the top prices the bidder was prepared to pay for an item based on past auctions.

I hope these tips have been useful to you. Happy bidding!

About the author:

Amy Chan has been running a part-time eBay business online for the past 3 years and is also an avid eBay bargain hunter. She is also a hobbyist columnist for several online article blogs. You can view her latest articles on the topics of newborn baby clothing and preemie baby clothes