How to find eBay auctions ending soon with no bids

eBay's own search can filter by bid count

Ask around and someone will point you to a third-party site that scrapes eBay for auctions nobody has bid on. You don't need one. eBay's Advanced Search has a field called Number of bids, with a minimum box and a maximum box, and it sits right under a time filter called Items ending within. Use the two together and eBay shows you only the auctions closing soon with zero bids.

Here's how to set it up on eBay's US site:

1. Open eBay's Advanced Search page. On a desktop browser it's the Advanced link beside the search button.
2. Type your keywords, the same words you'd put in the normal search box.
3. Under Buying Format, pick Auction. Fixed price listings have no bids to count, so leaving them in just adds noise.
4. Under Show Results, tick Number of bids from and type 0 in both boxes.
5. In the same section, tick Items, leave the first dropdown on Ending within, and pick a window, say 2 hours.
6. Press Search, then change the sort to Time: ending soonest. The results can come back sorted by Best Match even with the time filter on.

When we tried it with "film camera" and a two-hour window, we got 32 auctions, and the first few all showed "0 bids" with under two hours to go. Your count will depend on what you search for and when.

Two more parts of the same form are worth knowing about. Local pickup under Shipping Options and Items within 25 miles of a ZIP code under Item Location narrow the list to things you can collect in person, and a collection-only auction can only draw bidders who live nearby. Listed as lots under Show Results finds multi-item lots, which is where a lot of resellers do their sourcing.

Why an auction ends with nobody bidding

A zero-bid auction isn't automatically a bargain. Sometimes buyers looked at it and passed for a good reason, so it helps to know which kind you're looking at.

• The starting price was too high. An auction only gets a first bid when someone thinks the opening price is worth paying. If the seller started it at the price they hoped to end at, nobody had a reason to open. This is the most common case and the least interesting one, because the price isn't low.
• Buyers couldn't find it. A typo in the title, a vague title like "old camera", or the wrong category keeps a listing out of the searches buyers actually run. eBay itself suggests searching misspellings for exactly this reason: fewer people find a listing with a typo in it. This is the case worth hunting.
• The timing was bad. Plenty of people will tell you there's a best hour or day for an auction to end. We looked for proof and didn't find any that holds up, so don't assume a late-night finish explains a quiet auction.
• Something about the item put people off. Read the condition field before anything else. "For parts or not working" is an official eBay condition, and it promises nothing about whether the thing works. "Untested" isn't an eBay condition at all, and our listing red flags checklist explains what the seller actually picked when they wrote it.
• There's a reserve. eBay keeps a reserve price hidden unless the seller states it. On a reserve auction, an opening bid below the seller's number wins nothing, so a quiet reserve auction may be quiet for a reason.

Check these before you place the first bid

When a zero-bid auction does look underpriced, run through a short list before you commit. It takes a couple of minutes, and every item on it has cost somebody money.

1. Add the delivery cost to the price. A $9.99 camera with $5.93 delivery is really a $15.92 camera. Cheap opening price, expensive shipping is a common way to make an auction look better than it is.
2. Look up what the same item sold for. Turn on eBay's Sold items filter for the same search. It shows completed sales with a date on every row, which is closer to what people actually paid than any asking price. Sellers say those results go back about 90 days, though eBay doesn't spell that out anywhere we could find.
3. Read the seller's feedback and the item location. A seller with thin feedback selling something valuable at a low opening price deserves a closer look at the photos and the description.
4. Decide your maximum before you bid. You're unlikely to get out of a bid later. eBay only allows a bid retraction for two reasons, and bids on trading cards can't be retracted at all.

If you're buying to resell, add one more line: work out what you'd keep after selling fees and the shipping on the way out. A zero-bid auction can close well below the sold results and still leave you nothing once those come off.

Bid early, or wait for the final seconds?

One thing can change the decision on some of these. Some sellers add a Buy It Now price to an auction, and on most of those listings the Buy It Now option disappears as soon as the first bid lands. The exception is a reserve auction, where Buy It Now stays until bidding reaches the reserve. So if a zero-bid auction also has a Buy It Now price you'd happily pay, buying it outright is the move. Placing a bid takes that option away from everyone, you included.

When there's no Buy It Now, you're choosing between bidding now and bidding at the end. eBay allows last-second bids, including ones placed by sniping software. Bidding late won't get you a lower price by itself, though, because what you pay depends on the maximum you set and on what other bidders are willing to pay. The second you click doesn't change either one. On a zero-bid auction, an early bid mostly tells everyone watching that somebody wants it. Bidding late keeps that quiet, and waiting costs you nothing as long as you don't miss the end.

If you're new to how the format works, our explainer on auctions and Buy It Now covers what changes once the first bid arrives.

Catch the auction when it's listed, then check it near the end

The weakness of the zero-bid filter is that it only shows you what's ending right now. Whatever happens to close in the next two hours is what you get. You'll do better if you find the auction days earlier and come back to it near the end.

That's a two-step job, and FindersKeepers only does part of it:

• We tell you when a new auction appears. Search on FindersKeepers with the Auction filter on, then save the search. We re-run every saved search with alerts on once an hour and email you anything newly listed. If you're signed out, the results page offers hourly alerts for your search, and all it asks for is an email address.
• We remind you when a watched auction is about to end. Add an auction to your watchlist and we email you when it enters its final 24 hours.
• We don't count bids. Our search doesn't show bid counts and can't filter by them. When the reminder arrives, open the listing on eBay, or run eBay's zero-bid filter again, and see whether anyone has bid yet.

You can run that search without an account: type your keywords, set the listing type to Auction and sort by Ending Soonest. It works on any of the 14 eBay sites we cover, one site at a time.

A zero-bid auction is worth a look because its price was never tested. Nobody pushed it up, so the opening price is what you'd pay if no one else turns up. Most of these auctions are quiet for a dull reason, like a hopeful starting price. The ones worth the effort are the listings buyers never found, and the only way to see those is to go looking for them on purpose.