A guide to how I exclude so much from my eBay searches

[declanwmagee 122]

Here's an article that I wrote for a Facebook group about a year ago - it might be of some use...

 

"I often have a quick look through eBay on a Friday night.  I find it’s at an altogether more sensible pace than the madness of Sundays.

 

“A quick look through eBay”?

How can you have a quick look through eBay?  Wading through acres and acres of utter junk takes hours, doesn’t it?

 

Perhaps I should share one of my trade secrets.  Don’t tell anyone.  This is a filtering mechanism that I have developed over many years, and tonight, it reduced the list of what was presented to me from nearly a quarter of a million results to 66,000.  That means that 75% of the list is removed before I even see it, and if you sort your query by Ending Soonest, it means that I really can have a quick look through eBay to see if there is anything finishing tonight that takes my fancy.

 

Make a cup of tea at this point if you’re still with me – I am going to go into some detail.  All the examples I’ll use are my own personal preferences but I do understand that what I consider to be tat, others may consider to be treasure, so do forgive my ruthlessness.

I start by listing everything in the British Coins category, sorted by Ending Soonest.  Tonight it was around 225,000 items.

I use a three-stage process to reduce this number to something a little more manageable.

Stage 1:  eliminate things I don’t want to see, like 50ps and 20ps.

Stage 2: eliminate sellers whose tat I don’t want to see

Stage 3: set a maximum price so I don’t see things I can’t afford. 

 

Stage 1: Eliminate terms used in an items description, in my instance, this could be things like “50p, 20p, pound, proof, gold”.  You do this in the top search bar in eBay, using the syntax:

-(xxx,yyy,zzz)

I don’t want to see decimal coins, so a lot of my exclusions are dates.  You cannot use wildcards.  You used to be able to, but that’s a different story…

Soon, after playing with this a little bit, you’ll run up against a character limit.  eBay think that it is 100 characters, but I have found a workaround to extend that limit to 300 characters by enclosing three separate 100 character strings in three separate bracket pairs:

-(100 characters here) -(100 more here) -(and another 100 here)

Go one character over and it goes a little bit haywire, but you can always go back a page in your browser to recover it.  300 characters will keep you going for a while, but eventually, you’ll run up against that limit too, so you’ll want to use your 300 in the most effective way.  Some terms exclude thousands of items, and some only exclude a few.  “50p” excludes 35,000 records, while “brooch” only knocks out 127, so I rank the search term exclusions by how many records they exclude, and only use up my 300 on those that are worth using.  As we are limited by character, a small term, like “50p” (3 characters), is a lot more economical than a long term, like “enamelled” (10 characters).

This is where it can get complicated, and I leave it up to you, and the level of your own Asperger’s how far you want to go with this.  It gets complicated because items have more than one word in their descriptions, and you may already have eliminated an item with an exclusion already used.  Take gold sovereigns, for instance.  A search using “gold” brings up 6,500 results, so we can knock out 6,500 items by including “gold” in our exclusion string.  A search using “sovereign” brings up 4,000 results, but we cannot exclude a further 4,000 by using “sovereign” because most sovereign listings will also use the word “gold”.  In fact, only 650 listings used “sovereign”, but didn’t use “gold”, so by including “sovereign” when we’ve already used “gold” we only reduce the list by 650.  “Sovereign” is 10 characters, so at 6.5 items/character, “sovereign” is a very inefficient exclusion term.

Once you are happy with your query, save it.  I tend to save it in a text file, because eBay’s query management is not very intuitive.   The last time I did this exercise, in January, it was all about getting rid of Beatrix Potter, now it’s all about eliminating pound coins from the list, so I refresh my query three or four times a year, as trends change. 

 

My 300 characters removes more than half of the items in the British Coins category, about 100,000 listings.  That’s more than 300 per character, but it has taken many years to get it refined to that level of efficiency!

 

Stage 2:  Seller exclusion.

Anyone who spends any time watching eBay will already know the sellers that they tend to skip through, and there is a facility to remove those sellers from your query, in addition to the exclusions settled on in Stage 1.  Scroll down the left-hand side of the listings page, and you’ll see “More Refinements”.  A tab in that section is marked Seller, and in that tab, there is an exclusion box.  Select “Only show items from”, then “Specific sellers”, then choose “Exclude” from the drop-down.  The text box to the right is intended to contain a comma-separated list of sellers to exclude.

However, there is a bit of sloppy eBay programming in this form that needs a little workaround.  You cannot add seller names to this list one at a time without breaking the query before long – it adds spurious commas and spaces all over the place and the database just can’t handle that, so I keep my “eBay blacklist” in a trusty text file, using the syntax:

 

Seller1,seller2,seller3

 

No spaces, a single comma between names, and no carriage returns.  There’s 100 odd sellers on my list, but I’ve been building it for a while.  To update the seller list, update it in the text file first, then copy and paste the entire list into that little text box in eBay, in one hit.  Editing the contents of eBay's text box directly never ends well…

My seller list removes a further 40,000 items.

 

Finally, Stage 3, removing items that are too expensive.  This bit is easy, there’s a little box on the left-hand side that for once, is quite self-explanatory.  I change this every time I run the query, depending on my budget that day, and it usually reduces the list by a further 20,000 items or so.

 

If you made it to the end, congratulations, and I hope that’s helpful!"

 

 

 

[1949threepence 3,368]

Sounds incredibly useful, Declan. Thanks.  

[Paddy 1,829]

Yes - some great tips there! Just to reiterate a hint I put elsewhere, you can also use brackets for things to include. The minus sign "-" means exclude - the plus sign "+" means must include but putting in nothing defaults to a "+". So:

(1903, 1913, 1927) +shilling -(florin, jersey)

when used within British coins means "Give me anything in British coins that is dated 1903 OR 1913 OR 1927 AND has the word shilling in the title, but leave out anything which also has the word Florin OR Jersey in it."

I use this to search for shilling upgrades in multiple periods without also seeing too many florins (because they are often described as "two shilling") or coins from Jersey (which often are described as "thirteenth shilling" or similar.

You can save these searches in Ebay - the only problem at the moment is the title of your search will be the full search string you have entered. On occasions they change it so you can edit the title and give it a sensible name such as "Shilling upgrades" but they keep turning that function on and off!

 

[Peckris 579]

Thanks, Declan. 

[Nonmortuus 927]

Thanks guys.

[Mr T 189]

Nice, I've tried something similar before but gave up because of the character limit - that little hack to increase it is neat though.

This should be stickied.

[mick1271 159]

I do something the same, except I check "auction, ending soonest", after removing 50p, 20p, £1, £2 ,pound ,pence, beatrix  ,£5 etc. It takes it down to about 18,000. I then check " buy it nows" from the newly listed direction .The way I look at it , after being listed "buy it now" ,after 24 hours ,anything thats worth buying or is a bargain is already sold .

Edited July 22, 2018 by mick1271

[declanwmagee 122]

1 hour ago, mick1271 said:

I do something the same, except I check "auction, ending soonest", after removing 50p, 20p, £1, £2 ,pound ,pence, beatrix  ,£5 etc. It takes it down to about 18,000. I then check " buy it nows" from the newly listed direction .The way I look at it , after being listed "buy it now" ,after 24 hours ,anything thats worth buying or is a bargain is already sold .

Ah now, careful with that, Mick.  eBay, in their wisdom, do not recognise the pound sign, so if you exclude £1 and £2, you are also excluding anything with the numeral 1 or 2 in the title.  "2 bun pennies", thus will be excluded because you have put "£2" in your exclusion list.  

[mick1271 159]

18 minutes ago, declanwmagee said:

Ah now, careful with that, Mick.  eBay, in their wisdom, do not recognise the pound sign, so if you exclude £1 and £2, you are also excluding anything with the numeral 1 or 2 in the title.  "2 bun pennies", thus will be excluded because you have put "£2" in your exclusion list.  

That I did not know . thanks for the heads up on that .

[declanwmagee 122]

My pleasure Mick.  I do something similar with Newly listed Buy-it Nows as well, and find a surprising number of bargains.  I used to treat it as an "if I get time" kind of job until quite recently, when I found a 1904 halfcrown very close to VF for £15.  Sold a couple of weeks later for £150.  Worth doing.

[mick1271 159]

2 minutes ago, declanwmagee said:

My pleasure Mick.  I do something similar with Newly listed Buy-it Nows as well, and find a surprising number of bargains.  I used to treat it as an "if I get time" kind of job until quite recently, when I found a 1904 halfcrown very close to VF for £15.  Sold a couple of weeks later for £150.  Worth doing.

I have had a few bargains myself , but I tend to do it to try and pick up any penny variations I dont have .Still waiting on my Gouby x for less than a tenner lol. As with most of my collecting , if I am patient ,I will get it eventually at the right price .