Improving EBAY User Experience posted by David Swan

[CSJournals-migration]

Getting More From Saved Searches

 

As someone who is a big fan of EBAY I will confess that for a person who is targeting their searches towards comics it is not nearly as user friendly as other sites like Comic Connect, Comic Link or Heritage but it is possible to fake it and make your life much easier.

 

Let's say you have a list of Silver Age Superman comics you want and you don't want anything graded less than 8.0 (VF). You could do a search like this, "Superman VF #168" in order to get Superman issue 168 in Very Fine condition and then you have to sift through the results. The problem is you get issues of Superman Family and Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen and Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane and on and on. And you also need more searches for Near Mint and a search for 8.0. If you save your searches and have them produce emails you'll be getting a flood.

 

Here is a stored search I currently use....

Superman (vf,nm,8.0,8.5,9.0,"very fine") (122,127,133,134,137,143,154,164,168,171,174,176,178,180,182,198) -olsen -finest -lane -superboy -family -pal -FN -F/

 

What this search does is get any Superman comic for these 16 issues. The list of grade types will match on any within the brackets. I minus out any with olsen, finest, lane etc. as well as grade FN and F/. This does a very good job of focusing my search and allowing me to get just one email. There is other fine tuning I can do and with free form text some comics will always slip though the gaps. For instance if someone misspells Superman but for searching on EBAY it makes my life much easier.

 

For World's Finest Comics I had to start my search with ("world's finest", "worlds finest") to capture with and without an apostrophe. It's actually kind of fun putting together a search to really drill down.

 

See more journals by David Swan

[jackowick-migration]

Wow, very nice tip. I do used advanced searches with keywords and minus terms, but I never thought to use the match any terms.

 

On a related note, does it tick anyone off when people abuse the comic categories and suddenly you find a copy of X-Men 500 multi-listed in the modern, copper, silver, bronze, and GOLDEN age categories??? If you're listing a modern era comic under Golden age to try to generate more hits, you're really looking for a person who is such a rube that they wouldn't even know to search by era...

[Dr. Balls]

On a related note, does it tick anyone off when people abuse the comic categories and suddenly you find a copy of X-Men 500 multi-listed in the modern, copper, silver, bronze, and GOLDEN age categories??? If you're listing a modern era comic under Golden age to try to generate more hits, you're really looking for a person who is such a rube that they wouldn't even know to search by era...

 

I'd say 95% of those listings are purposefully put there - and it's annoying. However, I can tell you that I've won auctions by someone posting the wrong comic in the wrong era, and that is always awesome.

[pubmonkey]

Thanks for this, that's a great tip.

 

What really annoys me are:

 

non CGC auctions with "CGC" in the title

PGX auctions with CGC in the title: "PGX not CGC"

 

...to name a few

 

Also sellers who overprice their items and pay the relist fee week after week for months and months...don't they know they need to turn over their inventory to make money?

[miraclemet]

"CGC it"

 

drives me crazy... and its not like you can risk throwing out all the listings with "it" listed...

 

Of course the CGC world has nothing on the mess in the Original Art listings on ebay (prints listed with OA, non-Covers listed in covers, non-splashes listed in splash) the sub-catagories there are completely useless...

 

ebay has made listing and relisting so cheep/free that people can afford to leave stuff up for looooong periods of time and wait for that ONE buyer in a year who will pay their premium for a book as opposed to selling a book every month at a decent price...