11 Ebay Buying Tricks for Buying Toys
Buying secondhand on ebay can save you a lots of money. But it’s also easy to get caught up in bidding wars and drive the price up. There are ways to keep the price as low as possible so you really get yourself a bargain.
Avoid The Christmas Rush
Avoid buying in the weeks going up to Christmas. A lot of people are looking to buy toys then and it drives the price of the secondhand toys up. If you can, plan ahead and buy your toys before the Christmas rush. However, just before Christmas is a great time to sell all your unwanted toys!
Look To Buy Local and Pick Up
Sometimes you get the best bargains if you look for what’s on sale in your area and pick up. This especially works well for bigger bulkier toys and items as the postage for bigger toys normally adds a lot onto the cost. The great thing about buying pick up items from the local area is that there is less competition so the bidding wars aren’the as fierce and the price generally stays lower. Although, factor in any petrol costs to the price of what you’re buying.
Sign Up For Alerts
If you’re looking for something in particular you can put together a search for exactly what you’re looking for and sign up for alerts from ebay via e-mail. This means if there is a real bargain out there, you are more likely to get it.
Bide Your Time and Plan Ahead
It’s good to plan ahead and try and buy toys for birthdays and Christmas well in advance. This will give you time to search for the best bargains and save as much money as possible. If you are buying for a birthday next week you will have to take what’is available and it might be more than you really want to pay for it.
Avoid Those Bidding Wars
Don’t get carried away by entering into bidding wars. It’s so easy to think you have to beat another bidder but it is best to walk away rather than win a bid and pay over the odds for it. Bide your time - see above!
Do Last Minute Bids
One good way to avoid bidding wars is to decide the maximum price you are willing to pay and putting a bid on for this amount at the last minute. The only danger with doing this is quite often you forget when the auction is finishing and don’t put any bids on. There are sniping websites which you can use to put in a bid at the last minute for you. Just bear in mind that mostly these work fine, but there are the rare occasion where the bid hasn’t gone on for whatever reason (maybe their website went down or another error occurred). Or you could set an alarm on your phone to remind you.
Low Bidding
If you haven't got the time to do bids at the last minute and there are quite a few of the toys you want to buy on ebay, you can just put low bids on the items that you want. Then go away and forget about it and you never know you might just get it at the low price you want. If you do this enough you may often win bids that other people haven’the bid on with little effort. Obviously you don't want to bid on more than one of the same item at the same time as you might end up winning them all and having to buy them. YOU will want to put a bid on a new item after you have lost out on the previous item you have targetted so you just have one bid going at one time.
Make An Offer
You can always contact the seller through the ask a question link to make an offer. So if it’s a toy you really want, you could potentially offer a bid at the beginning of the auction (before anyone else has put a bid on) and see if it’s accepted. If it’s accepted the seller can set up a buy it now button so you can buy it at the price you’ve offered. Then you are also covered by ebay in case of any problems with the item.
Make Sure You Compare the Prices With Other Sites
Sometimes you may think you are getting a bargain on ebay but if you shop around you may be able to buy the item you want new for around the same price or for just a fraction more. This is extremely true if you are buying something new from ebay.
Find The Buy It Now Bargains
If I’m looking for a particular item, I quite often use the search function to find the lowest price buy it now options. Using the advanced search features, you can filter the items to include only the buy it now items. Then sort those items from the lowest to the highest price. Then you have found your lowest price buy it now item which is often a bargain. Sometimes it’s worth buying the lowest price buy it now so you don’the have to spend lots of time bidding on auctions. You may spend a couple of pound more but it could save you lots of time.
Always Bid A Few Extra Pence
If you are bidding on an item, always just bid a few pence extra to give yourself an extra chance of winning. So say you want to buy something for £20, always bid something like £20.03. This is because if someone else just bids £20, you will bit them with just 3p. This is a particularly good thing to do if you’re bidding in the last few minutes of an auction.