Monday, May 7, 2012

A Great Trick For Finding Great Deals on eBay.

eBay, for all of the crap that gets thrown its way - some of it earned, no doubt - is still the best place to find great deals on cards. The question then becomes, how adept are you at finding those deals? I feel my ability to land great deals has vastly improved over the last year or so, and it's interesting to look back at my time as an eBay novice. One trick I've learned to make use of is searching for players you're interested in by misspelling their name. Because let's be honest: people spell like garbage much of the time.


Case in point. The above Ryan Getzlaf Dominion relic is just the latest in my quest to acquire every Getz Dominion card I can get my hands on. It's not entirely unlike previous relics I've picked up, but how I found it is. I have "Getzlaf Dominion" as one of many saved searches that provide me with e-mails when items pop (another great tool, by the by). However, this newest addition to my Getzlaf Collection did not show up when I searched using the aforementioned phrase. Why is that, you may potentially be asking if you're still reading?

Well, because the seller incorrectly spelled Getzlaf. This card was listed as "Getzalf Dominion" and I thankfully spotted it with just a bit of time remaining in the auction. I put in a bid, and with far less eyes on the auction due to the seller's mistake, I took it down and got a nice deal on it at just $7.24 delivered. It's numbered 11/25, and comes from Getz's nameplate; I'm fairly positive it's the lower portion of the "Z."

So, the moral of this story is simple: expand your eBay searches, and fiddle around with misspellings of the names of your favorite players. We can't all know how to spell or how to Google difficult names to spell.

4 comments:

  1. No, I'm pretty sure that's the lower portion of the "L" from ALF!!

    nice find, I just put a very lucrative auto card on eBay and I made damned sure of the correct spelling of everything before I posted it!

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  2. Nice, good tip. I usually set up a bunch of search filters and keep checking those. I have one that's set to the "collectibles" sub-category of "cards" with the words "Red" and "Sox", starting at $0.01 and going to $1.99, in the US, ordered by ending soonest.

    Every once in a while (aka: too often), I'll take a peak and see if anything interesting is ending in the next hour or so. I've picked up a bunch of $0.99 stuff that way.

    You can also search more generic stuff like "jersey auto" and then limit it to under $10, and bid on the one's ending soon that don't have any bids.

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  3. Great pickup!

    The one trick I use when it comes to searching for Jimmy Howard stuff is to search "jim* howard" that way I get everything that's listed under jim howard (how his name appears on all his 05-06 cards) and jimmy howard (pretty much everything after 05-06).

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  4. Every couple times I search for "quad" under hockey and look for higher end goalie gamers. You have to sort through a lot of listings, including Black Diamond parallels if you don't sort 'em out somehow. But I just skim the thumbnails looking for masked men.

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