I have a feeling this is all old news for you guys, and you probalby have ebay techniques I've not dreamed of but in the interest that someone may find this useful, I'm posting the guts of a 'Geek Wiki article I'm writing:



Introduction



Ebay is a wonderful source of out of print (and in print for that matter) RPGs. However, it can be difficult to find books for below the average going price. For common and cheap material it doesn't matter too much - but this article assumes you are looking for more difficult to find material or material whose prices are high enough to make you want to take effort to get them at below average prices.



Secondly, you should always research prices. This can include Amazon Used, Ebay Completed Auctions and big online RPG stores like Troll and Toad where you can get a feel for the prices. Reputable valuation sites for specific material like The Acaeum (for Dungeons & Dragons) are good sources for the rare material. Once you have a feel for what an item is likely to sell/buy for, you know the target value you are trying to get on-the-cheap!



And you should be aware that buying anything used on ebay is a risk. Research sellers (feedback ratings, etc) and try go get a feel for the person via their listings. You can also ask questions of the seller - though if you are trying to snag a hard-to-find item at a steal price, you may not have the time. These are things that you can only learn with practice - in over 1000 transactions on ebay I've had a really good track record so just a little diligence goes a long way.



The Approaches



I've found there are three solid approaches to buying collector RPG items from ebay. They are:



  1. Scour new listings looking for buy-it-now bargains.

  2. Scour soon to end auctions looking for bargains.

  3. Scour for slightly mis-identified or hidden items.



Now... before we look at each of the above, let's look at some simple ebay search criteria tools that you should know.



* Using a dash [-] before any term will exclude search terms from the search. Example: Searching for Dungeons Dragons -dvd will find all items with Dungeons and Dragons in the title but without the word DVD in the title (so you don't get the two D&D movies or the animated series on DVD in your search).



* Using parenthesis () you can create simple either-or searches. Example: Searching for (D&D, Advanced, Dungeons, Dragons) Dungeon (Master's, Masters) Guide will find all Dungeon Master's Guides that are from the basic (D&D), Advanced sets or just some combination of Dungeons Dragons and Master/s Guide. This is a fairly powerful expression especially if you combine it with the dash [-] to exclude keywords as you wish.



* Once your search results are showing, you can click the sort box (at the top of the ebay search results) to sort by Ending Soonest and Newly Listed (among other sort criteria).



* Above the search results you can filter on Auctions, Store Inventory or Buy It Now (non auctions - fixed price).



* To the left of the search you can filter on Completed Listings (to get a price history for the past 90 days on ebay).



Armed with just those tools above, we can now attack the three approaches.



Attacking the Approaches



   1. Scour new listings looking for buy-it-now bargains.

--->Perform your search (see examples below and modify as appropriate) and select the Buy It Now Only filter and sort by Newly Listed. You can save this search in ebay so you can recall it in a few seconds. Check often (or have ebay email you - though it will likely yield better results if you check 2/3 times a day manually) and you are quite likely to get some items that pop up for well below the going price and snag it on a buy it now (as always, buy from reputable sellers - you'll learn those ropes soon enough).



  2. Scour soon to end auctions looking for bargains.

--->Perform your search (see examples below and modify as appropriate) and sort on Ending Soonest.



  3. Scour for slightly mis-identified or hidden items.

--->When you search, you can include item Descriptions which searches both titles and descriptions. You may get more hits than you want, but for those items which are mis-identified in the title (but not in the description) or are part of a lot (meaning a bundle of 2 or more items) of material you may find a gem hidden in an otherwise uninteresting auction.

--->When looking for mis-identified items, look for common misspellings. For example, searching for Feind Folio can turn up some results at times that others will miss. You can get clever with the either-or search criteria and look for things like (D&D, AD&D, Dungeons, Dragons, Advanced) (Fiend, Feind, FiendFolio, FeindFolio) Folio to unearth every Fiend Folio in existence. Remember, not everyone that lists knows the proper spelling, spacing or even that it came from an Advanced set of books (vs Basic).



Ebay Search Examples



   * (s1, dragons, D&D) (tomb, horrors) Finds all Tomb of Horrors on ebay (plus some other Tomb's but they are small enough to ignore and you will catch misspellings of Tomb and/or Horrors).



   * (D&D, AD&D, Dungeons, Dragons, Advanced) (Fiend, Feind) Folio -d20 -WotC -3 Finds all Fiend Folio books on ebay that are not part of the 3e or 3.5 edition from WotC.



   * (dungeons dragons, D&D, AD&D, rpg, role-playing, roleplaying, rollplaying) -ps2 -xbox -wii -dsi -ds -pc -ps1 -playstation -sega -nintendo -squaresoft -enix -snes -nes -dvd -ccg -gamecube -psp -miniatures -minis -figures -gameboy -360 The BIG RPG search that should return all role-playing items that are not miniatures and not video games.

I think most collectors guard their search secrets hoping to get a leg up.

I have reaped the greatest reward from not using a search at all but scanning through entire sections. This is incredibly time consuming though so it isn't cost effective. This is the only way to search for misspelled or mislabeled items.

This is a helpful post, thanks for writing it up.

Icar wrote:I have reaped the greatest reward from not using a search at all but scanning through entire sections. This is incredibly time consuming though so it isn't cost effective. This is the only way to search for misspelled or mislabeled items.

Yep.

Then there are the items that listed in the wrong section.  It's just dumb luck to find those at all.

benjoshua wrote:
You got a problem with miniatures?  

haha, no, not at all! I have a huge stash tucked away, all lead Citadel stuff from the late 80's, early 90's. I just couldn't keep anymore  
I'd sell them, as I know a few go for a few quid, but I don't get round to it...

I'll have to dig mine out and see what you think. I'll have a good look at your lot soon  

JohnGaunt wrote:Don't forget the asterisk's usefulness or uselessness as a wildcard character.  Used properly, the asterisk saves space in the search string; used improperly, the asterisk can find hundreds of thousands of irrelevant items.

Amazingly, I didn't know that! Woot! (and thanks)

-Dave

My big tip of the day:  Search in various categories where D&D doesn't "belong": comics, books, etc.  Also search in ebay.co.uk, which uses slightly different categories than ebay.com.