How To Find The Best Left Handed Guitars on eBay

As a left handed guitar player, it’s not always as easy as you would like it to be when trying to find your next bargain guitar on eBay.  You may be blissfully unaware that you aren’t searching correctly and are in fact overlooking many hidden gems!  This guide should hopefully give you all the tools you will need to reliably uncover the best lefty guitars listed on eBay.

Consider for a minute that you want to buy a left handed Godin guitar. You pull up the eBay homepage and type ‘left handed Godin guitar‘ into the trusty search box. Bingo! You get a result…

Straightforward enough right? Sure, in this case, but unfortunately not everyone listing a left handed guitar has the mental fortitude to include a functional title description such as in that example. The reason for this is both simple and frustrating – creating an eye-catching title description for a lefty guitar is instantly more challenging due to the fact that you have less typing space to play with.  Right handed players don’t need to waste space telling bidders that the guitar is right handed, but us southpaws do!  By the time you’ve thrown in every synonym and abbreviation for ‘left handed‘ you’ll be lucky to have enough room left to tell your potential bidders the brand of the guitar!

So what do people do? They sacrifice space to better describe the guitar, failing to adequately advertise the left handed orientation of the item.  Let’s take a look at a few examples of how sellers choose to describe their guitars…

As you can see, sellers use different terms and abbreviations to advertise the left handed nature of their guitars. Obviously you would grow weary of searching for each of these different description terms, and you certainly don’t want to trawl the entire list of guitars on eBay, looking for left handed guitars one by one.

Smart Searching

Here is the search enquiry that I personally use to ensure that I find all of the best lefty guitar deals on eBay.  Surf over to the guitar section on your country’s eBay website and enter : (left,lefty,lh,l/h,southpaw)

What this is basically saying to eBay is ‘show me all of the listings which have ANY of these terms in their title description. So in this case any auction which has any of ‘left’, ‘lefty’, ‘lh’, ‘l/h’ or ‘southpaw’ in their title.

If you’re looking for a specific brand or model just throw that in after the end bracket, for example ‘(left,lefty,lh,l/h,southpaw) ibanez‘ will throw up all of the left handed guitars from Ibanez. You can also further hone your results by choosing to omit certain keywords. For example if you want a Fender in any color but red or black you can try ‘(left,lefty,lh,l/h,southpaw) Fender -Red -Black‘. Experiment with it and tune it to your needs. A top tip is to use this custom search enquiry and then save the results page to your favorites/bookmarks list, this way you don’t need to type it in everytime you want to check for new deals.

Sure, you could just tick the ‘left handed’ checkbox on the sidebar when searching, but when you consider that a large number of people will not bother to input the fine details such as this when listing, this method of searching becomes less than reliable.

Now that you’re armed with your laser-targeted search terms let’s go back to our original search example. If I now search eBay Guitars for ‘(left,lefty,lh,l/h,southpaw) godin’ we get back 3 results! That’s a significant increase! Obviously Godin is a less common brand so in the case of something more mainstream like Fender that could mean a large number of extra options for you depending on where you live.

International Left Handed eBayers Have Extra Problems!

Unfortunately for some other countries such as the United Kingdom, proceedings are even further complicated by the addition of a left handed guitar category in the guitars section. “But LeftyFretz, how could that possibly make things more complicated, now I don’t even need to search with that stupid long search string!!? ” Well the left handed category is more a burden than anything else, and I feel that eBay should remove it – here’s why…

• Not all sellers will be aware that there is a left handed guitar category and will list in the regular section blissfully unaware.
• Some sellers will realise that the category exists but will continue to list in the regular section believing they will get more traffic there. They are also reluctant to pay to list in both categories
• Many sellers who do list in the lefty category think that listing in this section means they are free to omit the guitar’s dexterity in the auction title, therefore making it impossible to search for in general.

The example above shows an acoustic guitar listed in the Left Handed Guitar category without any left handed tags

So what does this mean for left handed UK eBayers? Simply put, it means that if you search for guitars purely in the left handed category you will not discover all of the guitars that are available to you.

Let’s do a mini case-study here for a second and see what we can discover. If we browse the left handed category with no search terms we throw up 143 results. Now go back to the main guitars category and do our lefty search enquiry ‘(left,lefty,lh,l/h,southpaw)‘. Here are the results of the LeftyFretz jury…

• 131 guitars in ‘Left Handed’ (this means that 12 were described improperly)
• 25 guitars in ‘Electro-Acoustic’
• 312 guitars in ‘Electric’
• 131 guitars in ‘Acoustic’
• 14 guitars in ‘Other’
• 613 left handed guitars in total (an increase of 470!!)

So as you can see, the search procedure for left handed guitar players in the UK just got a lot more involved. If you reside in good ol’ Blighty I would suggest that you do the custom search enquiry in the general guitars category and then head over to the left handed guitar category and search for whatever brand/model you’re looking for, omitting the ‘(left,lefty,lh,l/h,southpaw)‘ search.

That concludes our guide to smart eBay searching, I hope you will use this information to make your next southpaw guitar purchase a good one! Now that you know how to find the guitars take a look at our guide on How to Get The Best Prices on eBay Guitars

Do you have any personal eBay tips to share with the left handed community?  Leave a comment below below so that we can add your ideas to the guide!