Goofbid Review – BEST eBay Sniper & MORE?!

A couple of weeks ago I posted an eBay Sniper Showdown, where we pitted three different online snipers against each other (you can find that here if you missed it). And one of the contestants in that “competition” was Goofbid.

Goofbid actually performed very well in the sniper test, pretty much tying with Gixen, both of which easily beat out the paid option. Impressive!

And in that article I mentioned how Goofbid isn’t just a sniper tool. It’s actually a site that contains a number of Buyer Tools and Search Tools that are supposed to help you uncover bargains on eBay… bargains that you can re-sell for some easy profit!

Sounds perfect for anybody using my Used Goods Concept to get started on eBay with a small budget or for anyone using my system on How to Become a Top—rated Seller in 30 Days.

And that’s exactly why I am now doing a full review of Goofbid, to find out if these really are tools that will allow you to “bag a bargain” or is it all simply a waste of time?

Let’s get to it!

As there are a number of tools on Goofbid, I think the easiest/best way it to just go through them one by one. As I mentioned earlier, they are split into two categories – eBay Search Tools and eBay Buyer Tools:

eBay Search Tools

Free eBay Sniper

This is of course the sniper tool that we’ve already reviewed. Goofbid themselves describe it as being “simple, effective and reliable” and I’m happy to report that they’re right on all counts!

The one thing that I’d like to see added is a grouping feature, so that you can set snipes for multiple items that all are cancelled as soon as one wins.

eBay Misspelling Search

You see a lot of these tools online, with whole sites dedicated solely to it. Basically the idea is to find listings with a misspelled title.

The logic here is simple – if I list a Samsung tablet but write “Samsong” in my listing title; then less people will see the listing; less people will bid on it; it will sell for a lower price.

Genius, huh? Well not quite. These sites usually fail to mention that eBay’s search algorithm does of course account for misspellings! So it doesn’t mean that because I didn’t write Samsung correctly nobody will see my listing.

Don’t get me wrong, I do see some value in this tactic, it’s just not the easy goldmine that a lot of people make it out to be. I think it’s most effective for specific products that are often misspelled. A perfect example of this is Scalextric:

There is a big market for these products on eBay, and the brand name in itself is actually quite hard to spell. Let’s test out my theory using Goofbid!

All I do is go to the homepage, type in “scalextric” (remember, you should spell it correctly!) under the eBay Misspelling Search box, and click enter:

Goofbid returns 87 results for scalextric, with a variety of misspellings:

And now it’s time to see how useful this search tool is! What I’m now going to do is head to eBay itself, and search for “scalextric” again, sorting for Auctions and Ending Soonest.

What I’m testing to see is if the first result from Goofbid shows up on the eBay search, even with the spelling error.

So I make the search on eBay:

And then scroll down to the corresponding end-time to see if there’s any sign of our Goofbid uncovered auction – and the answer is…

NO! It is nowhere to be seen when relying on eBay and their search algorithm:

A very good start for Goofbid! And it looks like there is some value in the misspelled title after all. Though we do have to bear in mind that I chose an ideal product for this and it won’t always work so well.

Redoing the search for “Avengers Age of Ultron Blu-ray” returns this result:

So it really does depend on the particular product you’re searching for.

eBay Not in Title Search

This is a very interesting variation on the misspelled title idea, and as far as I know Goofbid are one of, if not the only site to be doing this.

Basically the idea here is that you search for a listing where the seller hasn’t properly described the item in the title. Once again the logic is very simple, as if I’m searching for a PS3 version of a Disney Infinity Starter Disc, but the title just says Disney Infinity, I’m more likely to skip past it.

I can actually think of a few different products niches where this tool could come in handy and for our test I’m going to search for “Steelbook”. Anybody who buys and sells used Blu-rays on eBay knows that steelbooks often command a much higher price than normal versions, and a few of my blog readers and customers have emailed me in the past when they’ve made a very nice profit buying a steelbook version that wasn’t clearly advertised as being a steelbook! A silly selling error, but something that we’re only too happy to take advantage of.

Alright, so after searching for “steelbook” on Goofbid, a selection of different eBay categories comes up for me to choose between:

I click the first option and am then presented with the results in the same way as before. However, disappointingly, it’s not what I was hoping for.

Checking the results on eBay and they are all just normal DVDs and not steelbooks. I don’t know if I’m using the tool incorrectly and it’s meant to be for something else, as like this it doesn’t seem to be of any use, which is a real shame as I was actually quite excited by the idea.

eBay Local Search

Another very simple (yet clever) idea! eBay really isn’t the best place to sell items for local pick-up, yet you do see products for “collection only” fairly often. This means potential bargains for us savvy buyers!

I tested Goofbid’s tool by entering a postcode and seeing what auctions came up:

And here are the results:

Looks promising enough, right? However when I click on an item to check the listing on eBay itself, I see something quite worrying.

Shipping IS offered for this item… which really defeats the whole purpose of this search, as the idea is to find items that are for local collection only.

To be sure that it wasn’t a one-off glitch I checked out many of the other listings and sure enough the vast majority of them offered shipping.

So once again a good idea with poor execution and results. The tool is still usable, but I’m disappointed by the fact that it doesn’t perform as I’d expect and still requires a lot of manual work. This is a worrying reoccurrence and I hope the other tools from Goofbid perform better.

eBay Feedback Checker

The description that Goofbid provide for this tool is “easily view all of the negative and neutral feedback a seller has ever received on eBay.”

eBay’s own feedback checker only covers the last 12 months of course, so while I can’t see a huge number of reasons why you would want to go further back in time, it could be useful on occasion.

So to test it out I enter Babz and click search!

And from there a new tab pops up, opening this page:

Surprising, right? After all, that is just the feedback page on eBay itself, which I can access by clicking the seller name (in this case Babz) on any one of their listings. It still has a 12 month limit, and certainly doesn’t list all the feedback “a seller has ever received on eBay”.

I suppose it is quicker to find sellers’ feedback like this, if you have the names in a list, rather than search for them via Google/their listings but for the third time in a row, the tool doesn’t do as it says…

And now we’re actually finished with the eBay Search Tools, and are going to move on to the eBay Buyer Tools.

eBay Bid History Tool

First up is the eBay Bid History tool and this is supposed to allow us to “find out just what an eBay user is bidding on right now and what they have bought in the past”.

I type in an eBay username and hit enter and once again I am taken to a page on eBay itself – the main page when you click on any user:

There is very little of use for me here, so let’s quickly move on to the next tool:

eBay Seller History Tool

“Find out just what an eBay user has sold or is selling, and how much they have made”

At the beginning of this review, I would have been very excited by that description, but at this point I’m expecting the worst – another link to eBay!

Thankfully this time when I click search I stay on Goofbid’s site!

As you can see I get a list of listings, with the quantity available, quantity sold, price and shipping cost.

There are also some additional stats on the total number of items sold/not sold (i.e. listed) and the total revenue/lost revenue. Fairly useful but missing one hugely important piece of information – the timeframe!

I have no idea from what period of time these stats were taken. I noticed that the overall stats seemed to be updating in real time, so I can only assume they are ongoing but the start date… no clue!!

If you go to the overview section for this tool (Goofbid have one for all their tools, which is very useful as it includes a guide on using the tool as well) you can see that they list all the different things you can find out about your competitors using the eBay Seller History Tool:

But long-time blog readers, or any of my Easy Auction Business customers, will know that we already have a tool for that – Terapeak – which is simply unmatched when it comes to eBay data, and Goofbid is no exception.

So while you might get some interesting info using this tool, bearing in mind that’s it’s free, I still 100% recommended Terapeak if you’re doing some serious competitor spying! It’s a definite case of getting what you pay for with Terapeak, and the £10/month subscription will pay you back multiples times over!

eBay Feedback Checker Tool

No, you’re not going mad and yes, this is the exact same tool that we covered earlier, it’s just repeated under both Search Tools and Buyer Tools for some reason.

And that means we continue on to the 4th and final buyer tool:

eBay Best Offer Tool

Similar to the auction sniper, there are a number of such tools online and that’s not a surprise as this is a very useful thing to have when buying items on eBay.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, a best offer tool basically uses past offers to tell you how much a seller will accept, so that you don’t overpay. Simple, right!

To test Goofbid, I first did a search on eBay for “Blu-ray”, filtering to only show results that include a best offer option:

I then chose a listing at random-

Next I simply entered the seller’s username into Goofbid to see what comes up:

And the results are very good! Not only do I get overall info about the number of offers this seller has received and accepted, as well as the average reduction, I also get a full list detailing the exact offers received and whether or not they were accepted.

Now usually you would want to use this on a business seller who has multiples of the same item to sell. As then if an item is listed for £10 BIN, and you see that he accepts anything above £8.50 and rejects anything below, you know exactly what to bid…

In this case we have a personal seller, so he only has one of each item, which makes it less easy. However I can still use the historical data to help me. For example in this case I would start off with a bid of 40% less than the listed price, as I can see that he has accepted some offers with that hefty discount previously.

You have to use some common sense and judge it individually based on the item and seller.

Overall I am actually very pleased with this final tool from Goofbid! I’ve tested a few of these Best Offer tools previously and this was one of the best. Very similar to what we found with the Sniper and I think it leads me quite well to my final conclusion about Goofbid.

It offers a number of tools, and as is often the case, a lot of these are un-needed and fairly useless as you could just use eBay itself with the same results.

However, it does also offer some very useful tools, such as the sniper, best offer, and misspelling. These are all very popular tools and there are a number of different options online, but on all three occasions Goofbid’s offering is one of the best!

Then there are some tools that fall somewhere in the middle, such as the Not in Title and Local Search, which would actually be very useful, IF they worked as advertised. I am hoping that Goofbid concentrates on further developing these tools, as well as their core 3, rather than coming up with new ideas that don’t really add anything.

Maybe then I will upgrade Goofbid to a “must-have”, but for now it’s not quite there and instead sits just below with a “recommended” rating.

After all, the tools do provide good value overall, especially considering Goofbid is 100% free to use!

And that brings us to the end of today’s review!

What about you, do you have any experience with Goofbid or similar tools? If so please feel free to offer your opinion in the comments section below as I, and I’m sure your fellow readers, would love to hear from you.

Otherwise, until next time!

All the best,
Andrew