How to shop on eBay directly from your Mac

May 1, 2009 by Sukrit Dhandhania

GarageBuy is a Mac application that makes shopping on eBay more fun, a lot easier, and much more effective. It’s from the folks at iwascoding, the same people who brought us GaragePay. If you spend a considerable amount of time shopping on eBay you might find GarageBuy pretty useful. And it’s free.

To put it briefly, GarageBuy brings the Mac experience to eBay, with features like a slick search interface, a very smart Watch Auction option, and of course, beautiful integration with your Mac apps such as Mail.app and iCal. The developers have gone so far with this that they even have a button that allows you to Generate an Apple Script to place an automatic bid on an auction.

Get started with using GarageBuy by downloading it from its website. After the download completes it should mount the installer automatically. Drag and drop the GarageBuy icon into your Applications folder.

Launch GarageBuy by double clicking on the application’s icon in your Applications folder. You will see a setup window launch welcoming you to GarageBuy. Run through the setup quickly by entering the necessary information and hit Next a few times.

Once the installation completes you will see the GarageBuy main window. At the top left of the window is a search box where you can begin searching for stuff you want to bid for or buy on eBay. Feel free to play with the view options at the top of the window. If you like an item and want to monitor the auction just click on the Watch Auction at the top. It will go in as a new entry under a section that bookmarks auctions so you can check to see if something has changed.

If you like an item you can inform a friend by emailing them the auction URL by clicking on the Mail icon at the top right of the GarageBuy window. One fantastic feature of this application is that it allows you to create an Apple Script to automatically place a bid on the item.

All in all GarageBuy is a fantastic application if you use eBay regularly. It is well designed, costs nothing, and definitely adds a lot of useful features to enhance the eBay experience. Also, it’s the first Mac desktop application to be certified by eBay itself, so that says a lot. Happy shopping folks.