Buying computer gear through eBay quite successful

By Peter Vogel

Over the years I have purchased quite a bit of computer gear through eBay. Most of it has been industrial strength servers for my school or spare parts such as disk drives and fans. I've always had good success with these transactions.

Border hassles have held me back from buying from American sellers, as I've noted in several previous columns. Transactions with such sellers have nearly always had unpredictable final costs, as customs and brokerage fees in some cases equaled the selling price of the item.

EBay has useful tools that you can use to restrict your product searches, whether it be by location or by any number of keywords.

I've decided I want my computer students to know how to quickly locate computer gear from Canadian sellers, and I want them to be able to quickly eliminate "junk" from an eBay search.

A first step is to identify eBay's Advanced Search option. If you add only this one feature to your use of eBay, you will make a big leap forward.

In a "just for fun" exercise I have the students locate all items for sale in Canada, and then identify all of those sales that will be ending in the next minute or two. Advanced search lets you do that.

Here's how. Select the Advanced Search option. On the eBay.ca web site www.ebay.ca it is located to the right in the yellow search bar across the top of the page. Click on the text link. (If you go through the eBay.com site you may have to go through an extra step or two.) EBay's Advanced Search screen opens.

There are many options to select but for this exercise click on the radio button next to Items located in Canada in the Location section. If you are in the eBay.ca site then Canada will already be identified in the drop-down box; if you are in some other eBay site you'll have to select Canada manually.

Make no other selection yet on the Advanced Search page. Include no keywords. At either the bottom or top of the options list click on the Search button. Presto. There you have it. All items whose listings expire in the next minute or two. In fact, this is a list of all items for sale in Canada (along with a few items such as electronic downloads that aren't affected by borders!) In my test for this column the entire list was just over 480,000 items long, just over 100 containing the word "Catholic."

Interesting list, but really only useful if you are an impulse buyer.

If you'd like to narrow that list to display items located near your home, go right ahead. Jump back to the Advanced Search page and go down to the Items Near Me section. Turn on the check box, select a distance and then either enter a postal code or select a Canadian city. For the Lower Mainland you'll only find Vancouver and Surrey. The distance selector seems like the better option for this part of the world.

At the 10-km range the nearly half-million-long list has been reduced to around five thousand items, and at 50 km it is almost 30 thousand items.

You get the idea. However, I'm not really interested in this catch-all list. Let's get specific. I want my students to be able to size up the computer resale market quickly. Specifically, I want them to be able to locate a computer that could be put to use in a business setting, perhaps to replace a suddenly failed machine, or for a business expansion.

A search on the single keyword "computer" will bring up several thousand items located in Canada. Quite a few will be "shady" ads for free satellite TV on your computer. Get rid of those by adding the Boolean search expression -satellite to your search string. Boolean expressions of the type +keyword and -keyword let you quickly narrow your search by eliminating items with the "-" and requiring items to contain the "+" keyword.

You might as well eliminate a slew of other useless terms: -wallpaper (who buys these screen "wallpapers"?) -monitor, -converter, -mouse, -pad. You get the idea. You'll still see "free satellite TV" items listed in foreign languages but at least the list is now more manageable. An alternative to the -word structure is to drop all the unwanted terms into the "Exclude These Words" box.

With this and other eBay search-limiting and results-ordering techniques you'll quickly be able to size up the range of gear available to you. If you need to buy, say, 10 computers then restrict your search to "lots"; if you want to see the most recently listed items, use the sort option to put newest material at the top.

Once you've refined a search to the point where it meets your needs, consider saving it for future use. You might also want to consider setting an e-mail trigger for daily notifications of newly listed items meeting your criteria.

EBay offshoot Kijiji www.kijiji.ca has recently become a viable source for computer and other goods for sale in the Vancouver area. Its classified ad structure is designed to compete directly with the space previously occupied largely unchallenged by Craigslist www.craigslist.com.

Suggestions and comments about this column may be sent to peterv@portal.ca.