If you know what you are doing, then you can quickly find what you are looking for on eBay. Here are a few golden rules.

Be specific:  If you’re searching for the first edition of the original Harry Potter book, you should type something like ‘harry potter rowling philosopher’s stone first edition’ in the search box rather than just typing ‘harry potter’.  You will get fewer results, but the ones you do get will be far more relevant.

Spell it wrongly: It is a sad fact that many of the sellers on eBay just can’t spell. Whatever you’re looking for, try thinking of a few common misspellings.  Chances are that fewer people will find these items- and so they could be cheaper.

Get a thesaurus: You should try to search for all the different words that someone might use to describe your item, for example searching for both ‘TV’ and ‘television’, or for ‘phone’, ‘mobile’ and ‘cellphone’.  Where you can, though, leave off the type of item altogether and search by things like brand and model.

Use the categories: Whenever you search, you’ll notice a list of categories at the side of your search results.  If you just searched for the name of a CD because you want to buy that CD, you should click the ‘CDs’ category to just look at results in that category. Why bother looking through a load of results that you don’t care about?

Few people realise just how powerful eBay’s search engine is – a few symbols here and there and it will work wonders for you.

Wildcard searches: You can put an asterisk (*) into a search phrase when you want to say ‘anything can go here’.  For example, if you want to search for a 1970s toy, you could search for ‘toy 197*’.  197* will show results from any year in the 1970s.

In this order: If you put words in quotes (” “), then the only results shown will be ones that have all of the words between the quote marks.  For example, searching for “Revenge of the Fallen” won’t give you any results that say, for example “Revenge in the Village of the Fallen Leaves”.

Exclude words:   Put a minus, and then put any words in brackets that you don’t want to appear in your search results.  For example: “Star Wars” -(poster,photo) will find items related to Star Wars but not posters or photos.

[Tips: Anyway, if you have time then don't forget to browse. Once you have found the category relating to the particular items that you like, why not click 'Browse' and take a look through the whole category- you might be surprised by what you find.]