Expert: Marvinator - 12/21/2008

Question
QUESTION: I work for a repair company which services industrial electronic equipment for hundreds of customers. As you can imagine, there are many items we are continually searching for. Is there a way to load a running list of part numbers/model numbers automatically and display all results simultaneously? For example, every morning search for our top 200 items of interest.

Thank you for any assistance you may provide,

ANSWER: Yes, this can be done with a saved search, and using the speical characters in a search string.  

First, you have to know about searching on Ebay.  As an example, if you put in Alpha Baker then you're going to get every auction with the names Alpha AND Baker in the title, regardless of order.  Using quotes "Alpha Baker" will give you those auctions with Alpha and Baker in the title, but ONLY those auctions in which Alpha and Baker are side by side, in that order.  

But the one secret to setting up a search on Ebay that will help you the most, is the Parens.  If you put the following in your search,
(Alpha,Baker), you will get every auction wtih Alpha OR Baker in the title.  

In your usage, you would put (Part1,Part2,Part3,etc) and thus get a list of those parts you seek, all in one search.  It may take some work to get these the way you want, but once you get the search set up properly, you can save it in My Ebay and call it up with a click anytime you want it.  

One last clue.  I  find that when I use the above search that many auctions show up in which I have no interest, but because of their titles, I have  to 'exclude' them.  Using a minus sign will help.  As an example, the search (Alpha,Baker) brings up an auction with CHARLIE in the title, which is definately NOT of interest.  By amending my search string to exclude those auctions, I can leave those out.  (Alpha,Baker) -charlie does this easily.

Hope this helps.

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Is there a character limit that I should be aware of? Say that each part number has ten digits, is there a limit to the number of part numbers I can fill in before exceeding the search text field limit?

Answer
I'm sure there is a limit, but I've not found exactly what it is.  
I did a bit of research on this, and found some more information about other ways of doing searches which may help you.  

Ebay allows you 200 saved searches. AND you can set the searches to run on their own, notifying you when there is a match.  

This information can be found here:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/buy/save-searches.html

Hope this helps.