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During the Auction: Searching Completed Auctions

It's 11:13 p.m. and how do you know whether the bid you just placed on that DVD for which you've been searching is a good one? If you're looking for deals, online auctions are a great way to go. But sometimes it's easy to get caught up in the heat of the moment and you might make an offer that you later regret. So what to do when your mouse finger is twitching in anticipation but you need to do some quick referencing? Checking an auction site's recently completed auctions for the same item is an efficient means of determining whether it's best to bid or wait.

Quick and Dirty
Of course, there are other ways to check on a particular item's price range--price guides, retail Web sites, and brick-and-mortar stores, to name just a few. Yet when it comes to convenience, quickness, and on-the-spot comprehensiveness, nothing beats using a site's completed auctions search, which usually is found on an advanced search page.

Many sites offer this valuable capability (eBay, Yahoo Auctions, FairMarket-affiliated sites such as MSN Auctions), which allows you to see what kind of prices have been realized for recent listings of the same or similar item. However, not all auction venues offer completed auctions search, especially smaller, niche sites, which generally tend to have less robust search functionality than the larger sites. Still, even a large site such as Amazon.com Auctions does not allow users to search completed auctions; buyers (and sellers) have access only to active auctions.

Venues that offer completed auction searches leave the auction pages on their sites for a specified duration of time after an auction ends. The period usually lasts anywhere from 30 to 60 days, during which time the information (including closing prices) is searchable in the site's search engine.

Search Away
Here's how it works on eBay. First, if you're on a particular auction page, open a new window in your browser. (Using either Explorer or Netscape, this can be done by pressing Ctrl-N, or by selecting File-New-Window from the menu bar.) In this way, you won't have to repeatedly click your browser's back button to return to the auction and perhaps place a bid, and you can toggle between the two windows (the auction itself and your search results) by either clicking with your mouse or using the Alt-Tab key combination.

Once you have the new window open, find the main navigation bar at the top of the page and click on "Search." Next, under Smart Search, click on "Completed Items." From this page you can type in the proper keyword or keywords. You also have the option of sorting your results according to bid price, either by ascending or descending price. This will present the search results in the most efficient manner, as you will be able to browse the closed auctions from the highest price paid to the lowest or vice versa.

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