Searching for things on Ebay

General
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Okay so this may be a stupid question, but I try to keep an eye on ebay for different things more or less daily. I imagine many of you do the same. I was wondering what some of the keyword searches or sort options you all may be using or have found work well when you are just trying to generally browse and not look for a specific card.

I may totally be overthinking this, but does anybody have any tips to narrow down the flood of results you get when you search for “pokemon cards”?

Thanks!

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Ummm put in your willing custom price ooint amd go from there?

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Good idea. Ill have to give that a shot!

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My rule of thumb is that, if I am going full on generic and aim for “value” listings, I’m already not buying cards I’m trying to collect, but more-so buying cards to sell. There’s of course nothing wrong with that, but usually what happens is that I get a bunch of cards I’m pretty much disinterested with, and making me feel disappointed.

Therefore, you can typically find what you’re looking for by simply being a bit more specific and looking for a certain series of cards, such as “trophy” if you’re looking for pokemon trophies, “charizard psa” if you’re looking for charizard psa graded cards, etc.

You need to first go through your generic listings thoroughly in the price range you’re looking for, and after you went through the entire list and saw everything, you simply need to list by newly listed, and you would then get the latest stuff with those generic listings filtered in. This makes it super easy for me to find exactly what I am looking for! Remember, by being more generic, you’re naturally going to get a bunch of listings probably less relevant to what you’re looking for (and requiring you to refresh more often), whereas the more specific it is, the most relevant and less you have to refresh.

Note that this method won’t work if the seller typos their listing, which generally ties to a typically cheaper listing price from my experience.

Good luck!

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Thanks for the advice! Ill definitely give this a go!

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No problem, always a pleasure :blush:

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Honestly if you think its an obvious search its probably a good go. Plus ebay is so clued up if you searxh booster packs for example you will be put in the pokemon booster pack dubsection. Its really not that tough. Good luck!

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The key to a good search term is to make it broad enough that you don’t filter relevant things out but specific enough that you remove false positive matches.

Here are 3 hidden search tricks:

  • use “quotation marks” to do a literal match. If you don’t know what I mean compare the results for pokemon “psa 10” with pokemon "10 psa"
  • use a minus sign to exclude items with a particular term eg. pokemon wotc psa 10 holo -non to remove most nonholos from your search.
  • probably the most useful one. Using brackets you can do an OR. For example pokemon (japan,japanese) will include items with either the word japan or japanese

If you’re looking for something specific, a combination of these techniques can really sharpen your search results. Here are some of my saved searches as an example

1409×2036 192 KB

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Search “pokemon” and press F5 until a good deal appears

Also use the above tricks for optimum results

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Posts like this by my boy pfm is what separates E4 from all the other posers out there. This is collectors site where we help each other and share secrets because we all care about this great hobby.
Well done…

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When i’m really bored. there’s also sites like TypoHound.com that find listings that are mispelled…
you’d be surprised how many people mispell charizard on the daily and the listing never gets seen.
(Ex. charzard,charjzard,chaizard. charisard etc)

you type in your keyword, then it automatically searches typos close the word you chose.

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Thank you all for the awesome responses. I felt slightly silly asking a question like this because again it seems to have an obvious answer, but I figured more experienced collectors might have some tips so I posted it anyways. All of your responses have just proven that I definitely came to the right place, and that I am super lucky to be a member of this awesome community! Thank you all! Gary is definitely right when he said that this is what separates E4!

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Thanks so much for this! The minus sign saved me on a lot of searches, definitely cleaned up my EX Unseen Forces search that got bogged down with Gold Star dogs.

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Another point because a lot of people search like this. If you overload your listing with buzz words like Charizard, Holo, NOT 1st, etc. that aren’t true, I won’t see your listing as I’m filtering out these words. Most people dont put unlimited in their title, so I search -1st -shadowless. You’ll see more by removing slivers vs being too specific.

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