How to comparison shop on eBay

Just this weekend we bought a Garmin GPS receiver using Buy It Now on eBay. We saw one in the store and after checking online we found that we could get a much better deal there, and decided that we could wait to get one online.

EBay is a great site to find fair market value for the vast majority of things. (This is the price that a willing buyer and a willing seller will arrive at to complete the sale — presumably the lowest price the seller will accept, and the highest price the buyer will accept.) There are lots of sellers that compete for the buyers, and the buyers compete against each other to win the best items. So, fair market value is achieved in auctions with no reserve

But how do you find these auctions? Here's how I did it (for our GPS receiver):

1. Log onto eBay. If you don't have a free account, you'll want one so that you can check completed auctions.
2. Enter GPS receiver in the search box. 2187 items come up. Too many items. Let's narrow it.
3. Enter Garmin GPS receiver in the box. 583 items. A little better.
4. Check the “Completed listings” box on the left sidebar, and click the “Show Items” button. (This is where you need a free account.) These are the auctions that have ended, sold or not. It's a better guide for price than uncompleted auctions because a lot of bidding can take place in even the final minutes of the auction.
5. OK, back up to almost 2000 items. I'll refine it to Garmin 60C GPS receiver for now.
6. 145 items. This is good!
7. Now sort by price. Choose Sort by: “Price: highest first”.
8. Scroll past the featured listings to get to the highest price auction. The price will probably be colored red, which means it didn't sell.
9. You'll reach some green prices. These sold. A seller found a buyer!
10. Was the item that sold a Buy It Now sale, or an auction? An auction will have multiple bids and this should be shown on the listing. A Buy It Now will show just that. The Buy It Now auctions will usually (not always) have a higher selling price than the auctions, presumably because the bidders will see the Buy It Now prices and try to beat them.
11. What about the condition? New, or Used? Any extras? Free shipping? Make sure to compare apples with apples.
12. The best prices will probably be the completed auctions. These will have been items offered for sale with no reserve (meaning that the seller will accept the highest bid without reservation) and with lots of interested bids. The range of selling prices for these auctions — there will be a range — contains the fair market value as determined by eBay!

So, if you can find a deal better than this price, great! You can have good confidence that it's a good deal. We avoided overpaying in the store for our GPS receiver by doing this, and I'm sure you can save money by following the procedure for whatever you want to buy!