Ok. You've registered on Ebay. You're logged in to your account. Now what? Well, the short answer is that depends on you. Are you on Ebay to buy or sell?

When you have a new eBay membership, the place to start is the help section which is a goldmine of information on how to put the site to work for you. You will find tutorials on how to properly search for merchandise you want to buy. On the other hand, you will find a large number of help sections that will help you to get started in selling on eBay. You can access the help section by clicking the help link in the right hand corner at the top of any page.

For purposes of this article, we will assume that you have gotten your new eBay membership for the purpose of purchasing merchandise. So, we'll go forward from there. My short answer to the question of where do I get started, is to tell you to have in mind what it is you are looking for. Once you have that in mind, the rest gets easier.

You can find your item a number of different ways. This article will deal with two. First being the most obvious and that is to look in the category that your item is most likely to be located in. The other is to use the global search feature provided by Ebay. In this case, we use the analogy less is more.

Enter one or 2 key words for your item. If your item comes with different options, entering one or 2 of those can help you to narrow down your search. If you enter "widgets" You may end up with 10,000 results. On the other hand, when you enter "gold widgets", the Ebay search engine will filter out all results that do not contain the term gold or widgets in it.

The absolute best resource for learning how to use the eBay search engine is to use the help function mentioned previously in this article. That help feature can answer your question to nearly anything you need to know about how eBay operates. It can also give you tips on searching, offering you information such as Booleans you can use, clueing you in on operators you can add to the search term to get more precise search results.

The help feature can also explain to you the proper procedure to follow if you find there is a problem with another eBay user, or you find something listed that is against eBay policy. (Sometimes they get through, despite the fact that eBay is very proactive to prevent this from happening.)

The help section can also give you valuable information on how to use other features and tools provided to you by the site, such as eBay Blogs, where to find product guides and reviews, and more.

So, anytime someone asks me where to start on their new eBay membership, I do the very thing I told you here. Use the eBay help feature.