Winning on Ebay Revisited

Last July I did a post on winning stuff on Ebay - Stewart added a comment to my original post the other day and it's such good advice I thought it worth sharing in September 09!
My original post:
Winning on Ebay at the right price
Just thought I'd post my thoughts on getting an item at the right price (in particular where it's an item that's new and being listed by a dealer). The Garmin Edge 205 is a case in point. They're available for £174 on Amazon but you can get them cheaper online outside of Ebay. However on Ebay you get pretty much anything cheaper (in my opinion, one or two things to watch out for but most things cost less). Here's what I did to get the Edge for a good price. First of all put loads of them in a watch list. Then made a note of all the prices they'd gone for and put them in a spreadsheet. I then took out all the ones that went for more than £60 as there was no way I was bidding £60 for one with £13 on top for delivery and insurance. Any way after I'd done that I knew that a good number had gone for between £54 and £56 and the best times were 8am, 2pm and 8pm (by best I meant going for less than £60!). I then bid on 16 before winning the item for £54.56 which with the p&p and insurance came to £67So here's the key points:
Research price thoroughly
See what times the item sells in the price range you want to get it for.
Be persistent - keep bidding again and again on the same items but no more than the max you want to pay for it.
Posted by Paul at 20:55
Labels: ebay

Stewart's additional tips:

• Always check the Completed Listings for the sold prices, under advanced search.
• Check the Sellers Other Items, they may have more of the same article, let folks have a bidding war and you go for the other one completing an hour later.
• Consider using AuctionStealer, you'll get 3 for free without paying. It's rude to snipe a bid at the last few seconds but everyone is doing it.
• If you bid manually open 2 windows for the same auction, that way you can up your bid quickly in the last seconds.
• If you see a new item with a buy it now but you don't think it will reach that then entering a bid to get the auction started will remove the buy it now.
• Do a google for your chosen product. If lots have appeared on Ebay and seem cheap it's possible that Aldi for example are selling them off. EG, PC World recently had Garmin Edge 205 end of line for £50, snapped up and foks put them on EBay starting at £50.