There are many ways that will make your life of buying on eBay a hell of a lot easier, a few of which I will now explain.

1) Spelling
It may seem immoral, but the poor spelling of product titles by the sellers can be taken advantage of. This is more tricky than just spelling something badly and hoping for the best, there are successful ways of getting results from this method:

i) Try to think back to the good old days when it was just you and your computer, with its horrible beige keyboard. When typing, all people have something that they always mess up on, such as getting the double letters in a word mixed up when trying to touch type, for example: aaple instead of apple. Or sometimes even not typing the double letters at all: aple instead of apple.

ii) With the flood water of technology swilling around your ankles, how on earth are you meant to remember how to spell each and every flashy product name? Taking advantage of this is very lucrative indeed, for example kodac, codac or codak instead of kodak. Cannon instead of Canon, Dell Latittude instead of Dell Latitude, Vodaphone instead of Vodafone; the list goes on, and on, trust me.

iii) When in a rush, one is prone to typing things badly that one only notices when its nearly too late. Letters get mixed up, wrong keys are pressed in the frenzy of activity your brain is trying to process. Noika instead of Nokia, Nokai, Nkoia, and so on and so forth.

iv) To be able to spell badly with enough accuracy to immitate the mind of the careless and or vocabulary-impaired, one has to first be able to spell well enough to understand why things are spelt that way, and acknowledge in which ways words can be spelt badly. Being an inveterate typist is also exceptionally handy in this sort of field of business, since your typing hiccups will become part of your cretin-lexicon, as it were.

v) Don't stop until you have exhausted your idiocy. This is very important, since it means that you can safely say that nobody has spelt things too badly for your highly tuned brain to detect and indeed pounce on with the opportunistic greed that so blights our species. Generally speaking, the worse you have to spell and the longer it takes to root out the careless, the better it will be for you, because a) nobody bids on stupidly spelt expensive items, and b) How on earth will they go about finding it if they do want to bid on it?

vi) Expect the unexpected. Seriously folks, some people can't spell for toffee, and unjust though it may be, it'll teach em to spell better next time if you root out their error. Never think that surely nobody can spell that badly, because some of the spellings out there are quite frankly poor, for want of a better word.

2) Flail as You Fall
The art of flailing is quite a simple one. You have to lure the highest bidder into a false sense of security.

i) Bid at the very last opportunity. Once you have bid within the very last second you can afford to bid in over the creaky British internet, the highest bidder will most likely be sitting back with a cup of tea, feeling good that he staved off the competition, only to find out he has been foiled after it is way too late for him to do anything about it. If you want to make it a cheap shot, to really peeve the runner up, bid just over what you think his maximum bid is. This is risky if he has in fact bid more, but even if you don't win, it means that you've just shunted his bid skywards, in a sort of sore-loserish type way, which is suitable payback for bidding ridiculously in the first place. The safer way is to just bid a ridiculous amount at the last moment, which is still quite a smack in the face for the loser.

ii) Have no mercy. Don't leave the person with any window to strike back, leave no gap for reconciliation. If you do, then the games up.

iii) For gods sake, don't gloat. It's bad enough for the other person that you snatched the proverbial biscuit out of their open mouth, but for gods sake, don't eat it in front of them. Just be satisfied that you won.

iv) Be ruthless. Don't hesitate to snatch grab and swipe at the last moment, because you don't even know them, so why should you be nice? Do you think being a good sport and letting them win will ever benefit you, NO! It just makes you look stupid!

3) Safety in Numbers
When you find a juicy deal that no-one else has, don't just bid once, bid many times, to make it look as though there is tough competition going on, which will deter other prowlers such as yourself.

i) Go crazy in a refined way. Don't bid ludicrous amounts of times, because this just makes it look like a better deal to other prowlers. Less than ten is ideal.

ii) Only put your true maximum bid on the last re-bid. You don't want to rack up more than you expect, just go up in pennys for all but the last bid, and then show your true intentions.

iii) This method works wonders if you have immense feedback scores. People are naturally deterred by superior entities, and a ludicrously high feedback score makes them think you won't take any trouble from lowly inexperienced users such as them. Powersellers using this technique rarely get challenged, since they are the elite of the elite, and know how to best the opposition.

The combination of all of these techniques results in a formidable opponent for anybody who knows not how to exploit these simple techniques.