How to Recover Expired eBay Ads

If you are an intermediate or advanced eBay seller you may often like to reuse an old eBay ad instead of creating a new one from scratch. This can be done using the Sell a similar item menu option. Lets say you created a successful ad two months ago and would like to sell a similar product. What do you do? With a basic eBay account you go to My eBay and look at Sold items, but eBay only shows the ads for the last four weeks or so. Now what? There is an option in eBay to save templates, but what if you forgot to save one?

Even if you have the actual eBay item number of the old item, entering this number into the eBay search field will give you the familiar "Your search returned 0 items" message.

Here is a trick that really saved me a lot of work. If the ad is not older than 90 days, you can go to your Account section and select the invoice for the month you listed the old item. When viewing the invoice you can click on the old item ad number which will display the old ad. Now you can select the Sell a similar item option. Note that if you click on an expired ad which is older than 90 days, eBay will often just attempt to give you search results for similar items currrently listed by all users (not quite what you wanted). I find this a bit confusing since you are still in View Invoice mode.

Here's a secret: Sometimes you can still pull up an ad which is older than 90 days. It is now December 2011 and I just pulled up an old ad I wrote in April 2011! So it looks like ads older than 90 days may or may not be viewable using the View invoice trick. At least give it a try before rewriting a complex ad from scratch!

I still advise sellers to use a non-eBay website to archive photos. I've had success with www.photobucket.com. It is reliable, easy to use, and even after 90 days when the eBay ad is normally deleted, my original photos are still available and ready to use!