Hi, it's Neil Waterhouse
Today I want I talk about using advanced search commands
to help find things much faster on eBay
It's also a great way of finding items on eBay
that have not been listed correctly
so you can purchase those items
and flip them at a profit
by using the right keywords when you list them.
So today let's first of all start off with quotation marks " "
First of all, we'll do a search on keyword action dvd
with no quotation marks.
So we can see how many search results are returned
by not using a quotation marks.
As you can see here, there's 30, 697 results
And we're putting in quotation marks
"action" dvd
and then clicking the Search box
You can see the search results now drops down at only 8,732
and we can also, of course, drill down by
using different categories to get even less results.
The next one I want to talk about is using parentheses ( )
And this is a great way of using
funny keywords, which, like handbag purse
which a lot of people use those keywords
But one might person might put purse in their listing
and another person might put handbag in the listing
and you want to find both together
This can also be a great way of finding things
that are also in different countries
Like this is example different recoveries,
fins and flippers
Some countries call these swimming fins
or swimming flippers
Different countries called things different words
So it's a great way of combine them to in the search result
So let's do a search of purse, handbag
First, I'll do it with no comma and no parentheses
so you can see how many search results we'd get.
purse handbag
And as you see through here
79,123 results
Now we'll put parentheses and a comma in the middle
(purse, handbag)
And then do the same search
As you can see that's now up the search results
from 79,000 to 371,000
which is a big difference
So it's showing that different people,
different listers will use different keywords.
Now the next search command I want to talk about is the minus (-) sign
There's a plus (+) and minus (-) sign,
so first of all let's look at
the minus (-) sign
Let's just start doing with the keyword shoes
which obviously is gonna return a gazillion results
And sure enough 2.7 million search results
Let's put a - red, blue, purple
What this will do
This will get rid of
It won't show any results in the search results
for any listings that have the keywords
red, blue or purple
It shows shoes but not ones with red, blue and purple
This is a very very powerful tool
command to use for eBay
It really helps a lot
And it's easy to use in other search engines besides eBay as well
So we've got from 2.7 million down to 1093
And again we can reduce this even further by
going in different categories,
either women's, men's, etc etc
It's also a great tool, so like on the screen
You can see Follow This Search
And that's where you can set up a search so you get search results shown to you every day
It's a great way of narrowing down,
so instead of getting a thousands results,
you can narrow it down, and you might get 1, 2, 3, 5 results whenever you're searching something
Let's say you're searching it for a secondhand
notebook computer
or some other of a particular type
You can just narrow down everything so you just get the search results just for that item so
when you get that email you don't get a whole lot of other stuff
It's a brilliant tool for that
The next one I'm going to talk about is the
plus (+) sign to stop
the automatic expansion tool that eBay does
So eBay will automatically give you more search results like Google
that you might not want to see
because it's always trying to give you an answer
Now what this does here, it'll only show
listings that have the words harry potter dvd
So as you can see here
these are the search results,
and they've got the words harry potter and the words dvd
in the titles
Now the next one I want to talk about is
just the standard term
what it actually means is the standard commands
Let's say you're searching for
Let's say a new DVD player
And we'll do a search for that
Now, what happens here is
eBay will show any listings that have the words new DVD player in any order
So someone could have listed
dvd player new
It will still show in this search results
And as you can see, through here
All these listings here have those three words and they can be in in any order
Now if you want to just get them
in a specific order
then we need to go and do something like
let's search with say New York
so you only want to see things that have New York in that particular order
And we do that by putting quotes "new york"
As you can see here in the search results
everything here has the words New York in that particular order
Then the next one I want to talk about is
search command is
Using just the " ", what else it can do
Let's say, you just want to find
in a particular category, the word book and not books
So you would want eBay expansion tool to operate
just by putting in "book"
will stop that.
You will not see anything with the word books
As you can see from the search results
Angel darkness book and of course not the word books
That's all for this week
Please leave a comment for me below
Until next week
List More Sell More
This is Neil Waterhouse