Product Description

Want to know how best to use eBay? Whether you're a newcomer or longtime user, eBay Hacks will teach you to become efficient as both a buyer and seller. You'll find a wide range of topics, from monitoring the bidding process, getting refunds, and fixing photos so that sale items look their best, to in-depth tips for running a business on eBay and writing scripts that automate some of the most tedious tasks. That's just the nuts and bolts. The book also gives you an inside look into the unique eBay community, where millions of people gather online to buy and sell. Author David Karp - an eBay user from the very beginning - teaches you how to work within this community to maximize your success. eBay Hacks includes four sections: "Hacks for All" covers eBay's diplomacy and feedback system, describing how you can maintain a good feedback profile and use it to inspire trust in others; "Hacks for Buyers" shows you how to focus your searches to find auctions before anyone else--including ways to create an automated search robot. Then, learn how bidding works in the real world, using eBay's proxy bidding system to improve your win rate while spending less money. "Hacks for Sellers" teaches strategies for competitive selling, like promoting your items without spending extra money and protecting yourself from deadbeat buyers. Learn how to run a fulltime business on eBay by streamlining the listing process, communications and checkout; and "Hacks for Developers" delves into eBay's API, an interface for writing programs that do the work that most users have to do by hand through a Web browser.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #528551 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 331 pages

Review
"If you're one of the millions who dabble on eBay, then this book is essential reading. It'll be especially useful to those that want to learn how to run a full-time or part-time business using eBay. You'll not only learn how to make the most of what you already know about eBay, you'll be able to learn how to manipulate the system to save time and money as well as improving auction success." Internet Advisor, January 2004 "If, you are after a comprehensive handbook to every aspect of eBay, written in a style that treats it as the powerful tool it is (rather than something to sell bric-a-brac on), then this is the book you be buying." - Calum Marsland, PC How to: eBay

About the Author
David A. Karp is the author of O'Reilly's PC Annoyances and several other computer books. An avid collector, David has used eBay since it first launched and he's applied all that he knows about computers to making eBay work for him. He not only understands how eBay works, but how its culture works.

Excerpted from EBay Hacks: 100 Industrial Strength Tips and Tools by David A. Karp. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Hack #10 - Controlling Fuzzy Searches

Choose when and how plurals and variations of your search terms are used in searches.

For the most part, eBay searches return only listings that match your search terms exactly. That is, if you search for "possum," you won’t necessarily retrieve the same results that you would in a search for "opossum."

Historically, to perform a fuzzy search, you’d have to include all the variations of a word in the search box manually, like this:

(opossum, possum, apossoun)

or, to accommodate singular and plural variants, you’d have to type something like this:

(antenna,antennas,antennae)

The OR search commanded by the use of parentheses, as described in "Focus Your Searches with eBay’s Advanced Search Syntax" [Hack #9], takes care of this nicely. But it’s not always necessary.

As part of eBay’s new search engine (code-named "Voyager" and introduced in 2003), all eBay searches automatically include common plurals and known alternate misspellings of words. For instance, a search for "tire" will also yield results matching "tyre" as well as "tires" and "tyres," rendering the messy OR search unnecessary in this case.

Of course, the inclusion of these variations isn’t always desirable. For instance, if you’re looking for rooftop antennas for a Pennsylvania Railroad PA-1 locomotive, you wouldn’t so much be interested in a book discussing the antennae of Pennsylvania cockroaches. To force eBay to search only for exact matches of words, enclose such terms in quotation marks, like this:

pennylvania "antennas"

which is practically equivalent to:

pennylvania antennas –antennae

Whether or not the quotes will be necessary, or whether you’ll still need to manually include variations (using parentheses), will depend on the particular search you’re trying to perform. eBay’s fuzzy searches are based on a hand-selected dictionary of common variations and plurals, meaning that "tire" will match "tyre," but it’s unlikely that eBay will go as far as to equate "potato" with "tater."

Punctuation
To simplify searches that would otherwise require very cumbersome search phrases, nearly all forms of punctuation are considered equivalent to spaces in eBay searches. For instance, say you’re looking for a 1:43-scale model car; you might expect to have to type the following:

car (1/43,1\43,1:43)

Instead, all you would need to type is:

car 1/43

wherein the 1/43 keyword will match "1 43", 1:43, 1;43, 1\43, 1-43, 1.43, 1!43, 1@43, 1#43, 1$43, 1%43, 1^43, 1&43, 1_43, 1=43, 1+43, and 1~43.

Now, say that car is a 1968 Ford GT 40; the appropriate search phrase would then be:

(gt40,gt-40) 1/43

While gt-40 is equivalent to "gt 40", it won’t match gt40 (without any space or punctuation), so the OR search is still needed.

Unfortunately, punctuation doesn’t fall under the same rules as variations and plurals, meaning that the quotation marks discussed above won’t have any effect on unwanted variations. Furthermore, the equivalence of punctuation also means that the following will not work as expected:

"gt 40" -gt/40

See "Focus Your Searches with eBay’s Advanced Search Syntax" [Hack #9] for more information on search exclusions.

Customer Reviews

Indispensable if you buy or sell on eBay
O'Reilly's "hacks" series continues to impress. I've been buying and selling on eBay for nearly two years now, and have already learned a lot. In the few days it took me to read this book I learned as much again and more. Although split into 100 separate "hacks", this book is surprisingly enjoyable to read from cover to cover, and gives a real sense that the author knows what he is writing about.

The book is 1/3 buying advice and 2/3 selling advice. It's way more than just a user manual. As well as eBay itself, it covers a selection of third party tools and web sites which can help you get the best from your eBay transactions. Learning from the sections on "dealing with disappointment" and "keeping out deadbeats", could mean you can avoid those problems yourself. The tips on how and when to use the eBay "feedback" system are golden. There's even some detailed advice (with perl code) about how to use the "eBay API" from your own software.

The only slight downside for UK buyers is the relatively light coverage of ebay UK. It gets a mention, but several of the tips (for example "put a shipping calculator in your description") only apply to US to US transactions. That said, it's still at least 95% meat for us over this side of the pond.

If you buy or sell more than one or two things on things on eBay in the next year you really should get this book. It will easily pay for itself in saved time, shipping costs, and stress; it will help you win the items you really want, and it can probably get you better prices too. Go out and buy it

Excellent for newbies, drivvel for experienced users
I was disappointed by this book. Newbies will love it. If you have been using eBay for a while and have a feedback score, you won't need it: spend your money dialled up to the internet and read the eBay policies. The book tries to cover too many ranges of ability in one go. One minute you can be reading about leaving feedback (no brainer in my opinion), next you can be typing Perl script. Too US focussed, not enough UK insight. Buy another book in my opinion.