How to find Comic Book Deals on E-Bay

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How to Find Comic Book Deals on E-Bay

We all know there are some great deals to be had on E-bay if you use the website correctly and protect yourself. In this issue I want to discuss searching on E-bay to find hidden deals.

The rule governing auction sales price is:

more views = more bids = higher sales price

Keep this in mind as you read the next section.

The Basic Search

It's kind of ironic. A person who knows E-bay could be missing out on "deals" because they're conducting searches correctly. How is this?

When I first start a search for a specific comic on E-bay, I go to the comics area, and more specifically the Gold, Silver, Bronze or Modern area and type the name of the book I'm looking for in quotes.

For example: "X-men 1"

Why? This will limit my search to only those books I really want. I don't want to spend wasted time looking at every title that has X-men and the number 1 in the title. I want limited exact results. This is your typical "educated" E-bay search.

But I'm missing out on some great deals. But why?

Expand Your Horizons

If you really want to find some hidden deals, you need to expand your search. The way to accomplish this is to use a loose search term.

To start, if I were looking for a copy of X-men 1, I would go to the Silver Age section and type in X-men 1 instead of putting it in quotes.

If I want to expand the search even more, I will go to the main comics section (collectibles>comics) and type in X-men 1 without quotes.

If I want to get crazy, I'll just go to the main E-bay page and type in either "X-men 1" or X-men 1 (without quotes).

I do this to uncover incorrect listings. Remember what I wrote about the basic E-bay rule? Here's a refresher:

more views = more bids = higher sales price

Correctly listed auctions have more views, so they sell for higher prices. This is exactly what we want if we're selling. But not if we're buying. We want to find that auction that nobody sees. That auction that leaves the seller scratching their head saying "why didn't this sell for more?"

By expanding our search, we can uncover some of these hidden gems.

Look at some recent search results.

First, I want to the silver age E-bay section and searched for "X-men 1". This search turned up 13 items.

Next, I searched on the term X-men 1 with no quotes. This resulted in 53 items being shown.

Next search, the main comics section for "X-men 1". Result: 267 items.

My next search was for X-men 1 without quotes. The result: 1285 items.

E-bay main search for "X-men 1": 341 items returned.

E-bay main search for X-men 1: 1455 items returned.

Now a lot of these auctions are not what we're looking for, that's obvious. But we're looking for that hidden book. Does it take time? Yes. But with diligence you can be rewarded. By taking the time nobody else is willing to invest, you can find some real deals. This is what separated the pros for the amateurs.

Try it some time. You just may find one of those great deals!