Wait until the last minute

If you know you're going to be at your computer and able to bid when the auction ends then there's no reason not to wait until the last minute. The theory here is that by putting your maximum bid in at the very end of the auction, anyone competing with you won't have time to enter a higher bid. There are a few things you need to be careful of, however.

First, you need to be sure you are actually going to be around at the end of the auction. Set an alarm if you need one. Also, you need to make sure you're not going to get caught up in the heat of the moment. You want to have the maximum amount you can spend predetermined. Don't exceed that or you may end up paying more even if you wait until the last minute. Know how long it takes you to make a bid. Early in the auction if the price is low, go ahead and test how long it takes you to complete the bid. It will likely depend on your connection speed. Normally, a bid can be placed in less than 20 seconds, but you should test how long it takes you to do it ahead of time. You don't want to find you waited too long to place your bid and find that the auction ended before you were able to place your bid.

Find spelling errors

Some sellers in their haste to launch their auction won't double check to make sure they spelled everything correctly. That's bad for them, good for you. Do searches for common misspellings of the word you're searching for. For example, the word strawberry is commonly misspelled as starwberry. These type of auctions get less bids simply because less people find their listings. If you're looking for a popular item, then see if you can find any listings where the seller was careless and made a typo in their headline. You can usually get a much better deal on those listings.

Find crappy listings

Another way to find good deals is where the seller was simply lazy with their listing. Many sellers will use nice looking templates and list all of their features and terms. They include a lot of pictures and generally do all they can to make the listing appealing. Some sellers, however, are lazy. They simply write a sentence about their item and that's it. If you're looking to get a good deal, then looking for this type of listing is another way to get one. People who have pretty listings tend to get more bids than people who just throw up an auction that only took 15 seconds to put up.

There are still good deals to be found when shopping on eBay. By using the tips in this article, you're far more likely to find some of them.