eBay questions for the pros....

...How do I find a Tiki Bar on eBay? I type "Tiki Bar" into the search and it just gives me 10 pages of crap! Whats the deal?!

Any Hoiti Toiti's out there (near H.B.) wanna teach me how to use this eBay thing??

Any Hoiti Toiti's out there (near H.B.) wanna be my eBay Rep???

Ya, Ya. I know I'm "Behind Times". E-mail, TC and Web searching is about as Hi-Tech as I get! But, I can build 20 tiki bars to your 1! Class, Class, Anyone?

I'd be more than happy to help you with your Ebay needs. I've been buying and selling for about 4 years on Ebay. I mainly sell music but have sold antiques for my relatives. I will be at Doctor Z's on Saturday and would love to discuss your needs with you.

Ben, you can edit your searches to make them more specific, which may cut down on the number of false hits. If you follow a main search word with others in parenthesis.....say "bar (tiki,witco,bamboo,whatever else might be a desirable buzzword)", it will show you any combination of these words (eg "tiki bar","witco bar", etc.) If you then follow this with a " - " and words to exclude in parenthesis, it will exclude some of the chafe (eg. -(sign,glass,whatever other lame listing associated with "tiki bar" that keeps coming up to plague you). This is a pain in the ass to keep typing in each time you want to search, so you can save the search under your name to keep reusing it. Hope this helps!
SB

[ Edited by: suffering bastard on 2003-07-30 05:47 ]

[ Edited by: suffering bastard on 2003-07-30 05:48 ]

Another very helpful hint is using quotes. If you are searching for a tiki bar, the words tiki and bar in the description will make it appear. It might be "bar bell tiki." If you search for "tiki bar" it searchs for the phrase "tiki bar" rather than the words. This is also true for search engines. If you put tiki bar in google, it finds all sites with the word tiki and the word bar and gives you the ones with both first. If you search for +tiki +bar, it will only give you pages with both words. If you search for "tiki bar", it will only give you pages with that exactt phrase in it.

One more way to weed out some extraneous items would be to specify a minimum price. I just searched "tiki bar" and said $100 for the minimum price--and that narrowed it down to 24 items, some of which are actually bars. I also tried $50, but that added back in a lot of crud.

Since we're talking about eBay specifically and not a yard sale or flea market or whatever (where there's always room to dream of happy bargain finds), bars that are going for cheaper probably aren't worth a look.

I've noticed items do better when the opening bid is $1 so I don't exclude by price. If something is expensive a reserve doesn't seem to put off bidders as much as a high opening price. I've seen three Outre Shag mugs on eBay and the second one required an opening bid of $90 and didn't get a bid while the other two went well over $300.

That's interesting Cultjam. Whenever I search for Shag items I arrange the results based on highest price, and I never look below the second page because most of the items priced less than $80 are Shag-licensed trinkets or items clearly having nothing to do with Shag like "WOOD SIGN CARVED RETRO MODERN SHAG TIKI." For me, items that start at $1 just don't show up on radar until the price climbs past the trinket level.

Yo Reverend,

Swing on by sometime and I'll show you the ropes. Sometime between now and next week is good cuz I'm on vacation. Just kickin it by the pool with cold beer! :wink:

Suburban Hipster

The Sky Lounge print that just sold for $1,340 got a first bid of $10. That's my kind of trinket!

Yep, but it only took 2 hours from the time the print was listed until it was $300 - well beyond the tricket price point.

One thing I like to do is to go use the categories to the left on ebay. For instance if you click on the following

See All Ebay Categories
Collectibles
Cultures Ethnicities
Hawaiiana

You can then branch down to lower levels such as tikis, bowls, etc.

I also limit the search by selecting auctions that are ending that day. I have been lucky to find other items that I would not get in my normal searches.

What led me to keep looking at the $1 level was finding a print in Completed Items that had sold with the Buy It Now feature. That is only an option until the first bid is placed on an item. The print went straight from trinket to sold at what was a fair price for it.

Anyway, my point was, if you're selling, your minimum can keep bidders away even if the final sales price is expected to be much more.

On 2003-07-29 22:42, RevBambooBen wrote:
...How do I find a Tiki Bar on eBay?

Hey RevBambooBen
I just found your post. I want you to take a look at this Tiki Bar Its really nice work.

Blessings
Pentaclegoddess