Three tips to pay as little as possible when shopping on eBay Australia

by johna | October 29, 2024 | eBay and PayPal Computers & Internet

There's plenty of cheap items on eBay Australia but sometimes you can pay even less with a little bit of work.

Check eBay in other countries
This really only works when you are buying cheap Chinese products.

Often you will find that the same item is available in another country cheaper than on eBay Australia.

For example, take this car part I recently needed... I looked on eBay Australia and, as I usually do, set the the sort order to "Price + Postage: lowest first". The lowest price was A$18.89.

Next step is to try eBay in different countries. You can do the same search simply by changing the ebay URL in the browser address bar. Simply remove the ".au" to search eBay USA, which usually has the lowest prices. Or you can change the ".com.au" to ".co.uk" for searching eBay UK. You may even want to try "ebay.de" for eBay Germany. (For a complete list of eBay websites see eBay's Global Trade page.)

When you are using eBay for other countries obviously pricing is going to be in a foreign currency. But if you open the item page, you can change the URL back to "ebay.com.au", and the approximate converted price will be shown in Australian Dollars.

Note that not all items on foreign eBay sites will be available to be shipped to Australia. The item page will show whether delivery to Australia is an option and the price including an estimate of the converted cost in A$. However, most if not all items from China will be available to us.

For my search I found eBay USA to have the cheapest offer. The price was approximately A$11.48 - a significant saving.
Look for coupons

It's always worth doing a Google search for current eBay coupons.

Even if you haven't been notified by an email from eBay, there's usually at least a 5% off coupon for purchases over A$30 available.
Open more eBay accounts
A long time ago I opened up a second eBay account using a different email address which I used with a sniping service (a service that bids for you at the last possible moment). The reason was that I didn't want to expose my primary account password to this service as I didn't know if it was trustworthy.

I made a few purchases on this account but it stayed dormant for long periods of time.

But I started noticing that I was getting offers for this account that I wasn't getting for my primary account.

Some of the offers were incentives for me to return to eBay because I hadn't used it for a while.

The most recent offers were $10 off any purchase over $20 (titled "a little gift to lure you back") and another that was part of eBay's $100M giveaway offer. For my primary account I was offered $15 off for purchases over $120, but on my second account I was offered $7 off any purchase!

So having multiple accounts can be very worthwhile. You will need multiple email addresses but you may find you can easily create more email addresses as aliases of your current email address. otherwise you can just create free email accounts with outlook.com or gmail.com.

It doesn't seem to matter that you use the same PayPal account to pay.

I recommend that you check eBay terms and conditions to see if this is not against your agreement with eBay.
October 2024 Update - Wait for seller offers

If you are signed in to eBay and look at an item, there is a chance you might get an offer from the seller with a discounted price. I don't know exactly how this feature works, but to give yourself the best chance of getting a seller offer you should add the item to your watchlist. If there are multiple of the same item by different sellers, view all the items and add them all to your watchlist, and leave them there for at least a few days,

As an eBay seller myself, there is a page which tells me if there are some people who have looked at or watched one of my items and allows me to send them an offer. I can set a price and eBay will send the interested people an email with my offer. It also gives the option to automatically send the same offer to any other interested people in the future, until the item sells.

I use this technique often and although I don't always get an offer, it sometimes pays off.