Some Ebay expertise required

[Composite]

Right, every day, for the past 200 years (well, that's what it feels like) I've searched Ebay, globally, for "Helmets"....and every day I get presented with a list of c15,000 - 20,000 items....imagine going to a Fair every day and finding that!

....BUT every day...EVERY SINGLE DAY I have to scroll through loads and loads of what I assume are auto-posted Indian-made copies of Roman, Viking, Corinthian etc etc helmets.... Now, I love India...it's a beautiful country...I even go there most years...BUT I HATE THOSE BL**DY POSTINGS!!!!!!!!. Does any one know of a way I can live out the rest of my life without them?....I don't want to exclude India from my searches as you never know what might crop up......but these things haunt me...they test me...they tease me...and they laugh at me every day (Ok that last bit might just be my imagination). They are Harpies to my Patrick Troughton!!!!....can some one help me with the net? ('see what I did there?)

Anyone?

PS these are proper helmets...not TR ones.....

[Ubique]

Any word you don't want to appear in the auction titles you just put a minus ( - ) in front of that word.
For example, search: "Helmets -replica -roman -Viking" etc. You just need to spot the words that appear in most of the replica titles but not the good adds, you may not capture all of them.
Also, quotation marks ( " " ) can be very handy. For example, if you searched for American Helmets then you may also get American key-rings as well as Japanese motorbike helmets. But if you searched for "American Helmets" then that should only give you American helmets provided those words appear in the title.

Oz.

[BrodieBartfast]

You could always narrow your searches to 'WW2 helmets' depending on what it is you're after. There is also a specific militaria search criteria, but it tends to cut out a lot of the improperly listed stuff.

I regularly search for 'WW2 British', 'WW2 German' and 'WW2 ARP/Home Front' on eBay. Typing one of those search terms in usually gives you the option to filter exclusively for militaria. You could presumably add 'helmet' to the end of each of those searches. A more general search will always throw up all kinds of miscellaneous crap.

B.B.

[Jb4046]

Can’t you just put a filter on. Like militaria. I do that to eliminate the spartan helmets

[Composite]

Wow..thank you all.

I usually limit myself to “Militaria”...but, when I have some free time, I just go with “Collectables”. I’ve not heard about the minus signs before...and will give that a try.

Of course, if I miss anything going forward I’ll see you all in court! :-)

[HARRY THE MOLE]

A word of warning about modifying your search criteria... many of my really good finds on eBay have been 'discovered' because the seller listed it wrongly. This resulted in fewer of the 'target group' of potential purchasers even knowing it was on there - and me getting a damned good bargain!

[Composite]

oh yep...'been there....I've bought quite a few "Hemlets", "Helemts" and "Hmelets" in my time! :-)

[Watchdog]

I find it quite effective to just enter "combat helmet" or "steel helmet". This throws up much of no interest but usually nearly all of it is at least 20th century military and few reproduction pieces.


Regards

Mark

[Greg Pickersgill]

The two searches I use on Ebay Uk are

british helmet -police -pith

and

HELMET -BRITISH -GERMAN -PLATE -POLICE

both set to filter via Collectibles and then Militaria, and set to sort by 'Newly Listed'. Obviously you can add as many '-' terms as you see fit. Or indeed '+' terms to customise it even more for your own outlandish interests.

I also have set searches for other things including COMPOSITE HELMET set for Europe generally, CASQUE SUISSE for Ebay France, HELM SCHWEIZ for Ebay Germany, and so on. NB these are all saved as Firefox bookmarks, not as saved Ebay searches; the good part of keeping them all in a single Firefox bookmark folder is that I can fire one or all at once, as I see fit on the moment.

[SMP]

I always search under "Rare British Brodie with fake Div flash " but nothing ever comes up ! What am I doing wrong ?