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Hack 18 Find Items by Shadowing

Become an auction stalker and leech off someone
else's searching skills.

Often
the best deals on eBay are the auctions that most bidders
don't find, usually as a result of sellers not
knowing what they're selling or not taking the time
to promote them properly. The better you become at searching, the
more likely you are to find the auctions that are off most
bidders' radar. Sometimes, it takes nothing more
than dumb luck to stumble upon a great find; occasionally, it helps
to rely on other users' dumb luck (and skill) as
well.

As much as eBay is a single community of millions of users, it can
also sometimes feel like a bunch of micro-communities, each centered
around certain genres and auction categories. As you use eBay and
become more familiar with the categories in which
you're interested, you'll start to
recognize individual buyers who, like you, frequently return to eBay
in search of more antique pottery, model trains, Ford Model A
restoration parts, first-edition Hemingways, or whatever else you
might collect.

As soon as someone bids on an item, that bid becomes public
record,^[1] even though the bid amount is kept
private until the auction ends. All you have to do when you see that
someone has bid on something in which you're
interested is search for other auctions on which he has bid. Not only
will you discover auctions for similar items, you'll
discover new items that you may not have even known to look for.

^[1] The exceptions are private auctions and
auctions held in localizations with strict privacy laws, such as eBay
Germany (www.ebay.de).

To do this, just highlight the bidder's user ID,
copy it to the clipboard (Ctrl-C), go to Search By Bidder,
and paste (Ctrl-V) into the Bidder's User ID field.
Select No to exclude completed auctions, and click Search.
You'll then be shown a list of all public auctions
on which that user has bid, whether or not he is the high bidder.

2.11.1 Prevent Bidders from Shadowing You

It's typically in your best interest as a bidder to
have as few people as possible see an auction on which
you're bidding. Fewer interested bidders means fewer
bids, which, in turn, means a lower price and a higher likelihood
that you'll win the auction.

Bid shadowing is not common on eBay, but is practiced by some of the
more determined users from time to time. The best way to prevent
others from shadowing your bids is to bid later in the auction,
thereby shrinking the window of time during which other bidders can
see where you've bid. See [Hack #21] for a way to take this to the
extreme and effectively eliminate shadowing altogether.