eBay Hacks

Search by Seller

Easy ways to find items sold by a particular seller.

If for no other reason than to save money on shipping costs, you may find yourself wanting to purchase multiple items from a single seller. Although you can’t specify a particular seller when typing into a basic search box, there are three other ways to do it.

View Seller’s Other Items

Probably the first thing that occurred to you is to just use the “View seller’s other items” link on the auction page. If so, give yourself a gold star. This is typically the easiest way to search by seller because you can see an up-to-date listing of all the seller’s current auctions.

Although this is good for perusing, there’s no easy way to search here. The only thing you can do is use your browser’s “Find on this page” feature (Ctrl-F), but this isn’t exactly a breeze when the seller has over 1,100 open auctions divided into 47 pages of auction listings.

Tip

See [Hack #12] for a way to increase the number of items shown per page, thereby reducing the number of pages.

A Real Search by Seller

The most effective and flexible way to search by seller is to go to Search → By Seller and then use the second, somewhat hidden box at the bottom of the page. If you use the first box at the top of the page, you’ll get the same thing as “View seller’s other items.”

The Multiple Sellers search, shown in Figure 2-3, allows you to do an actual text search on the auctions from one or more specific sellers. Simply type ...