Christmas time! And you want to buy some presents… ebay could represent a good option to save some money but it needs a lot of time because you want to be sure you are bidding at the right price to the best (used or not) item.
The web is full of websites which help you to discover and follow items on ebay but, in the real world, from the moment you find something to the end of a winning auction many days pass and often you have not time to follow and properly bid for your “catches”.
The software I use and recommend for ebay auctions is AuctionSieve. This software is written in Java and consequently it is multiplatform. In the Download Page you can always find the right version for the OS you are using.
On Linux, download AuctionSieve, extract the file and save it to (e.g.) Home. Open the folder you created and give the permission to execute as program to auctionsieve.jar (right button on the mouse –> Properties –> Permission –> Allow executing file as program”). Then open it with (in my case) -OpenJKD Java 6 Runtime-.
AuctionSieve is intuitive but you have to “play” with it for a couple of hours before dominating all its features. You can save your searches, focus on just one category, filter items using “catch” or “trash” words options, create personal watchlists and evaluate the price of a particular item using the “Price History” tab. If you repeat a specific search you did in the past, you can decide to automatically exclude all the items you have already seen before and you will spare more time examining the results. Moreover, when you begin a “New Sieve”, you can also import the same search criteria you created and selected during a previous search you did.
Let me suggest you to read the AuctionSieve Tour page before using it. In this way you will skip all the most common mistakes that beginners usually make.