How to: Use and/or operators in an eBay search

As an avid eBayer, I’ve often been frustrated by the search function that they offer. In Google and other search engines, I love to use ‘and’ and ‘or’ to relate my search terms in order to get the exact results I’m after. For example, a search for ‘ski or snowboard’ would return anything with the word ‘ski’ or the word ‘snowboard.’ In eBay, however, this will return anything containing the word ‘ski’ and the word ‘or’ and the word ‘snowboard.’

This results in having to do multiple searches of the same category for different types of items, which is annoying and wastes time. A couple of days ago I finally figured out how to include multiple search terms in the same search by implying the ‘or’ relationship. For the ‘or’ operator, simply put all your search terms in brackets, separated by commas. So the above example would look like:

‘(ski, snowboard)’

You can then extend this by including the and operator (remember, a space between words is interpreted as ‘and’ by eBay). So, if I was to search for ‘(ski, snowboard) goggles’ it would return anything containing ‘ski’ and ‘goggles’ or containing ‘snowboard’ and goggles’. Take this even a step further by including a second set of brackets, for example:

‘(ski, snowboard) (goggles, gloves)’

A simple tip, but one which I am already putting to great use. If you have any eBay tips of your own, please be sure to let us all know by leaving a comment below.

Thanks for reading!
-Howo