eBay: The Missing Manual

My eBay—Your Shopping HQ

Hours of searching and scrutinizing auction pages can send your head spinning like a special effect in The Exorcist. Once you've found two or three possibilities out of four gazillion auctions, how do you find them again? How do you remember which kewpie doll you bid on when there are 300 up for sale? And how do you know if you're still the high bidder or if someone's snatched the kewpie from your clutches?

To keep you organized, eBay creates a page for you and you alone (Figure 1-21). Your My eBay page shows you items you're bidding on, auctions where you've been outbid—and auctions you've won and have to pay for. And that's just for starters. You can reach My eBay by heading to the top of any page on the site, finding the navigation bar, and clicking the My eBay Button.

Note

You must be signed in to eBay to see your personal My eBay page. But if you sign out, no problem: just click the My eBay link at the top of the eBay home page. Instead of the My eBay page, you see the Sign In screen. Type in your eBay ID and password, click Sign In Securely, and your My eBay page appears.

Figure 1-21. My eBay is your very own personal eBay data center. Your eBay ID appears at the top of the page. This view shows My Summary (you can change the view via the eBay Preferences link located under My Account). My Summary is handy because it shows you an at-a-glance overview of your recent eBay activity: auctions you're bidding on, merchandise you're selling, items you've put on your Watch list (Section 1.5.1). You can select the information you want to see (and the order you want to see it in) by zipping over to the upper-right corner of the page and clicking Customize Summary (the first few letters of which are visible in this screenshot).

Your My eBay page is an invaluable headquarters. It lets you keep track of the specific auctions you're interested in—whether you're bidding, selling, or just watching—and do other important stuff, too, like update your account information and save searches for when you're in the mood to power-shop. With all these goodies, My eBay provides a handy home base for exploring the site.

On the left-hand side of the page is My eBay Views: a menu of all the different parts of your My eBay page. You can customize the way your My eBay page appears by choosing from this menu. The next sections explain your choices.

My Summary

My Summary is shown in Figure 1-21, and it's the page that appears whenever you log in and click My eBay. My Summary gives you an overview of your recent searching and trading activity: the items you're currently bidding on (if any), how many items you've won (and lost), how much you've spent on eBay so far, and so on. My Summary is a good choice for getting a bird's-eye view of what you've been up to on the site.

Tip

If you'd like to set up a different view to greet you whenever you visit My eBay, find the My eBay Views menu on the left-hand side of the page, and then click eBay Preferences. Scroll down the page that opens until you find the section called My eBay Preferences, and then make your selection from the "Default opening page" drop-down list.

All Buying

Imagine heading for the mall with an assistant whose job it is to keep track of everything you buy, everything you think about buying, and even the sale items you miss out on. You could use that information to fine-tune your shopping list—know the best prices, the best stores, the best times to shop. The All Buying section of My eBay is just such an assistant: it records your activity related to shopping and buying.

Here's what you'll find in All Buying:

• Watching. If you want to keep track of an interesting item but you're not quite ready to bid on it—perhaps you're waiting to see just how high the price gets—you can watch the item, which means that the item, its current high bid, the number of bidders, and the amount of time left in the auction appear in this section of your My eBay page—along with a Bid Now button in case you want to stop watching and get in on the action. To learn how to add an item to your Watch list, click "Watch this item" in the upper right of any auction page.

• Bidding. If you've jumped into the fray and bid on something, information about the auction shows up here: the current price, whether you're the high bidder, and how long before the auction ends.

• Won. This section records your triumphs—auctions you won as the highest bidder. These auctions appear for up to 60 days or until you decide to remove them.

• Didn't Win. This section shows items you bid on but didn't win. Viewing this information not only reminds you what you've been shopping for, it also shows you what the prevailing bid was, so you can adjust your bidding next time around.

Start Selling!

When you first register with eBay, you can bid on items, post on discussion boards, and search the site. If you want to sell, you have to go through another registration process. This link lets you register as a seller. To learn how to sign up to sell on eBay, see Section 5.4.

My Messages

If you've ever had a spam filter swallow an important email, you'll be glad to know that eBay's doing something to make sure that your eBay-related emails never suffer that fate. My Messages, shown in Figure 1-22, started as a way for eBayers to receive official eBay announcements about the site.

Figure 1-22. Your My Messages Inbox lists all incoming eBay related communications. You can flag, delete, or transfer any message; just turn on the checkbox next to one or more messages and take one of the actions at the bottom of the message list. From the left-hand My Messages menu, you can view only messages you haven't read or the ones you've flagged. Your Sent folder stores a copy of every message you send through My Messages. You can copy messages from the Sent folder to store in other folders, but you can't move or delete Sent messages.

In mid-2005, eBay enhanced My Messages in three important ways:

• Account-related messages. Instead of just general announcements, official communications from eBay related to your individual account (such as invoices, notices of a password change, and so on) now appear in My Messages. Spoof emails, official-looking emails sent by crooks hoping to steal your account information, have become the bane of the Internet (see Section 4.3.3 for more on spoof emails). If you get an email that looks like it's from eBay but suspect it's a spoof, check My Messages. All eBay communications about your account appear in your My Messages Inbox. If it's not in there, it's not from eBay.

• Answers from Customer Support. If you've emailed eBay with a question or problem, the response appears here.

• eBayer-to-eBayer communications. One of the biggest causes of negative feedback is miscommunication. When you use My Messages to contact another eBayer, eBay sends two copies of your message—one to the person's My Messages inbox and the other to his registered email address. Now you can be sure that your trading partner gets your emails.

My Messages lets you create and use up to ten personal folders to store your messages, so you can organize your communications in any way that makes sense to you.

All Favorites

Here you can save searches, sellers, and categories that interest you. Saving searches buys you time and effort when, for example, you're hunting for baseball cards to add to your collection or an out-of-print DVD for a gift. You can run the same search over and over, whenever you want, without having to type in keywords.

You can save searches by keyword, or if you find yourself returning to the same seller's auctions again and again, you can save that seller as a favorite—and even receive emails when the seller lists new items. (See Search for Items by Seller on Section 3.1.3.)

To save a search, under My Favorite Searches, simply click the "Add new Search" link. A form opens, much like the Advanced Search (Section 1.3), letting you choose search criteria. Fill it out, run the search, and then on the search results page in the upper-right corner, click "Add to Favorites." Once you've saved a search, it appears on your All Favorites page with an "Edit Preferences" link that lets you adjust its search criteria.

Figure 1-23 shows how to save a favorite category search to streamline the time you spend searching, making it easier and faster to find the things you want. For example, if you collect antique Buddha figures, you can save a category search that, with one click, will show you what's newly listed in the Antiques/Asian Antiques/Statues/Buddha category.

To find a favorite category you've saved, go to your My eBay page, scroll way down to the section called Shortcuts to My Favorites, and choose the Select a Category drop-down list. If you prefer, you can get to your favorite categories from the left-hand My eBay Views menu: under All Favorites, click Categories. Finally, your favorite categories also show up on the Advanced Search page under Favorite Searches.

My Account

This view contains the nuts and bolts of your eBay account. If you move or change your phone number or email address, you want to make sure that trading partners can still find you. You can also subscribe to eBay services or change your notification preferences—how often you hear from eBay, and about what.

Figure 1-23. To get here, from My eBay, click Category → "Add a favorite category." Select a general category in box 1. Relevant subcategories open in box 2. If there's an arrow next to your choice, eBay has more subcategories to choose from; your cursor jumps to the next box, and more categories appear. When you've got to the point where there are no more subcategories, eBay's assigned number for that category appears in the box at the top. You might have to go through several subcategories to find the specific type of item you want. When you're done, click Submit at the bottom of the page.

Here's what you can look at or change under My Account:

• Personal Information. View or edit the information you submitted when you registered: your eBay ID, password, email address, mailing address, and any financial information. If you've created an About Me page (Section 6.1), you can change that here, too.

• Addresses. View or change your eBay registration address, the address where you receive payments, and your shipping address. For most people, these three addresses will be the same.

• Manage Subscriptions. This page is where sellers can sign up for and manage various services eBay offers, including eBay Stores (Section 7.3), Selling Manager (Section 9.1.2), eBay Blackthorne (Section 9.1.3), and Picture Manager (Section 6.2.4.2). You must have a seller's account and, in some cases, a certain amount of feedback to subscribe.

• eBay Preferences. Some people like to hear from eBay constantly. Others prefer to keep their inbox relatively email-free. Choose Notification Preferences to customize when and about what eBay can contact you. You can receive an email to let you know when an auction you're watching is going to end soon, when you've been outbid, when you've received feedback or need to leave it—or not. It's up to you. Most notification options are already turned on, so be sure to visit this page and fine-tune your preferences.

  Tip

  If you'd rather not receive telemarketing calls and direct mail from eBay, scroll down to the bottom of the Notification Preferences page and turn off both checkboxes under Other Contacts.

  You'll also find Authorization Settings on the eBay Preferences page. This section reminds you if you've OK'd any third parties to perform actions on your behalf on the eBay site. Examples include installing the eBay Toolbar (Section 3.1.13) or signing up to put a counter on your auction page (Section 6.3.1). If you don't want any third parties messing around with your eBay account, turn on the "Revoke this authorization" checkbox, and then click Apply.

• Feedback. For every eBay transaction you participate in, you have an opportunity to give and receive feedback, rating the transaction as positive, negative, or neutral, and leaving a brief comment that's permanently added to the receiver's Member Profile. This page reminds you if you haven't left feedback for a trading partner and shows you any recent feedback others have left for you. Feedback is what makes eBay work—it's how buyers and sellers who've never met know they can trust each other. So when you've finished a transaction, leave feedback to let the world know how it went. For more information on how feedback works, see Section 2.1.

Note

If you're registered with PayPal (Section 2.3.1.1) or if you're registered as a seller, information about your PayPal account and any selling activity—such as auctions you're running or fees you owe—also appears on your My Account page.