More on offsite eBay Feedback Tools

The eBay community at large is gearing up for the upcoming changes to the feedback system. Most notably, beginning in May sellers will no longer to be able to leave neutral or negative feedback for buyers.

Another site which has been developed to level the playing field is AfterTheGavel. This rather innovative website has been created as an off-eBay destination to post, and access feedback about buyers.

As set forth on their site:

"AfterTheGavel is for sellers to be able to manage risk for their online auction businesses. As the world of online auctions changes sellers need to know who they are dealing with as buyers as much if not more than buyers need to know sellers. AfterTheGavel.com will serve as a balancing weight to keep this information available to sellers".

The addresses AfterTheGavel.com and LeaveAuctionFeedback.com both point to the same site.

Registration and use of this site is free. Another great tool in your arsenal for the brave new eBay world!

Fine-Tuned Feedback Finder

When you take a look at a prospective eBay trading partner's feedback, and want to view any or all negatives received, it can be a long and tedious process to scroll through many (perhaps hundreds or thousands) of feedbacks to see what the problems &/or comments were when someone left negative or neutral feedback. An easy way to solve this problem is though the website Toolhaus.

Here you can just pop in a user name, and receive a result list of ONLY negative and neutral feedback received.

Toolhaus offers and entire suite of tools related to eBay feedback. Most interesting are the soon to be launched tools to deal with the seismic changes coming to eBay's feedback system next month. While sellers will no longer be allowed to leave negative feedback for buyers, it is posited that sellers will leave text such as "neg" or "negative" in the comment field for the mandatory positive only feedback. Toolhaus has designed a tool to detect such "false positives" as well.

This site is very useful, and plans to continue to evolve to meet the needs of the eBay community. A keeper!

Treasure Hunting on eBay

The informationist in me understands the importance of keyword searching. Computers are a bit stupid in this one respect. Most search mechanisms can only produce results for the exact word you type into a search box. Therefore, if there is a typo in an eBay title or description, the result list will not include that auction. Listings with errors are viewed by FAR less people, and generally will sell for much less then a properly listed item. You may be surprised how many listings on eBay contain such mistakes. How does one find these buried treasures of eBay? You could run multiple searches for every possible misspelling or typo, which is quite tedious and time consuming, OR you can check out the following very cool websites:

The first tool for "sniffing" out such listings is TypoHound.

Type the item or keyword you are looking for into the TypoHound search box and it will generates a search with the following typos:

• Character typed twice
• Character omitted
• Characters swapped
• Key next to correct character hit
• Key next to correct character and correct character hit

Another such tool for your arsenal is Missing-Auctions.com

This tool offers some advanced search options such as limiting a search to a specified category, "buy it now" items, searching both title and description, and more.

Both sites are excellent ways to find extraordinary eBay bargains! Yo ho!