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Help Credits

  1. Do I need to buy search credits?
  2. How do I buy search credits?
  3. How Are My Search Credits Used Up?
  4. My credits are used up quickly. What can I do?
  5. How Many Credits do my Searches Use?
  6. How do I use my credits more carefully?
  7. Example Search Costs.

Do I need to buy search credits?

No. Our free account is very useful to help you find and buy the items that you are looking for.

However, if you wish to run more than one search, or wish to use enhanced features, then you may wish to buy search credits.

How do I buy search credits?

You can purchase search credits using either a credit or debit card or a Paypal account. You can pay in US Dollars, British Pounds or the Euro.

How Are My Search Credits Used Up?

For every item that our system finds on eBay, it finds all of your searches that match the item according to: eBay Site, Category, Minimum Price, Maximum Price, Item Condition, Ship to Locations and the optional local search criteria of Postal Code, and Minimum Postal Cost.

Then, for each of your searches that matches those criteria, it runs your search terms against the item to check for a match. Running that search uses up one credit (of value £0.00001) (to pay for running the search).

If the item matches the search then another ten credits (value of ten credits: £0.0001) are used up (to pay for the notification).

Therefore, the cost of your searches depends upon two things:

  1. The number of items that your searches are run against.
  2. The number of times your search matches an item that it is run against.

Reduce the cost of your searches by:

  1. Reducing the number of items that your search is run against by using the criteria: eBay Site, Category, Minimum Price, Maximum Price, Item Condition (and the optional local search criteria of Postal Code and Minimum Postal Cost).
  2. Reducing the number of times your search matches an item by improving your 'seach terms'.

My credits are used up quickly. What can I do?

You have searches that are being run against a large number of items. This can be for the following reasons (usually more than one of the below reasons):

Or you have searches that are triggering a lot of notifications. This can be because you have not chosen your 'search terms' carefully.

Understand our search system further here.

How Many Credits do my Searches Use?

Each time one of your searches is run it costs you 1 credit (to pay for the search being carried out).

Each time one of your searches matches an item, it costs you 50 credits (to pay for the notification).

How do I use my credits more carefully?

Be more specific in your search terms.

Be more specific when selecting your search categories.

Example Search Costs

We check items on eBay every minute. So in one day (24 hours) we check for each of your searches 1,440 times.

Example search for: Sideshow Iron Man Figure

A search in the category "Toys & Games> Action Figures> Comic Book Heroes" on the UK site, with minimum price of £150 and maximum price of £200 (including postage) in condition 'New' or 'New other' with shipping available to Great Britain.

The cost of running this search for six months was found to be less than 1 penny (UK Sterling) because only 2 items were found matching the narrow criteria and only 161 eBay items needed to be checked against the search (due to the narrow criteria).

This is an extremely competitive cost.

Example search for: Sideshow Iron Man Figure

A search in the category "Toys & Games> Action Figures> Comic Book Heroes" on the UK site, with minimum price of £0 and maximum price of £600 (including postage), in any condition with shipping available to Great Britain.

The cost of running this search for six months was found to be about £30 (UK Sterling) during which time 43 items were found matching the criteria. Most of the cost consisted of checking over 2.5 million items against the search - due to the wide price range (which was probably unnecessary if you are trying to find a bargain).

This is an expensive search. It is best to have narrower criteria that will only find items that you are interested in.

The ultimate full site search: (don't even try this!)

This is made up of two searches (1) Search for all items in all top level categories in one eBay site that have the letter a in the title and (2) Search for all items in all top level categories in one eBay site that do not have the letter a in the title.

This pair of searches would check and email you notifications for all items on the chosen eBay site. The cost of this search is estimated to be in the region of UK£100 to UK£200 per day. However, you would be receiving over 1 million emails per day from the system - which isn't going to work!

This is terrible value for money!