Ebay can be a wonderful place to buy gold and silver products, but it can also be full of overpriced items and outright scams. These tips can get point you in the right direction when it comes to aquiring worthwhile bullion items.

Before you bid, do a little research about the current metals market. The first thing you will probably want to do is find a site that lists current spot prices (I like Kitco, but there are dozens of good ones out there!). Spot prices will tell you the real-time value generally for a troy ounce (1/12 of a pound) of the given metal. On some of these sites, you can pull up historical charts of precious metals prices, where you can look up everything from yesterdays performance to how prices have chages during the past couple centuries. (It really puts things in perspective!)

If you've got a week, I would recommend a bit of "fantasy" metals investing. Give yourself a theoretical budget, watch the spot prices, and map out how much your investment would be worth if you bought and sold various amounts throughout the week. You are probably not going to be buying and selling real-time like a stock trader, but it can be a worthwhile excercise in getting a feel for the market and avoiding rash decisions later.  (If you just have to get started now you can maybe skip this, but I still recommend following current prices.)

When searching for and reveiwing listings for bullion products, make sure you know as much as you can about the round, bar, or coin.

If it's a bar or round-- is the purity and precious metal content stamped on the item? Also, is the mint readily known? If you can't identify the mint, purity, or content of a bar or round, it is probably not a worthwhile investment. If you are buying a gold or platinum bar, does it come sealed with an assay card from a reputable mint? Especially when you are dealing with such expensive metals, you want this assurance that it is genuine.

When dealing with bars and rounds you will find many different varieties. When starting out, you will want to narrow your focus. There are some highly-collectible types, like Chinese Pandas, Austrailian Lunar Series, commemorative coins, etc. These are easily recognized, but there will be a significant mark-up over spot because of their collectibility. They are certainly fun and worthwhile to own, but if you are trying to maximize the amount of metal you own ounce by ounce, this is not the way to go. Also, (and I admit this may be a personal preference) you may want to avoind bars and rounds stamped with birthday and graduation messages and pictures that seem novelty-like. When and if you do choose to sell your investment, you will have an easier time unloading simple, stately bars from upstanding mints than you will selling a pile of stuff with the Easter bunny on it.

Coins can also be a wonderful way to aquire gold or silver, especially because you will not being paying as much over spot as you might with bars or rounds. It is critical, though, that you can know the purity and can calculate the actual content. For example, US coins with 90% silver will have .7234 troy ounces or silver per dollar for each dollar, so if you've got $10.00 face value of 90% silver coins, you'll have about 7.2 ounces. Pretty easy conversion. If you throw a handful of countries into the mix, though, it can be a little trickier to keep tabs on. Make sure when you buy, that you know how much silver or gold the coin really has.

If you are trying to buy from merely an investment standpoint, avoid buying jewelry with precious metal content and vials of metal flakes. I admit, I love the flake vials as a cool novelty to adorn my shadow box, but the metal inside is next to impossible to weigh, and the amount inside is often too negligible to be considered an actual investment.

The last bit of advice I will offer pertains to storage. It can be very sophisticated or relatively simple, be the goal should be to keep your investment organized and safe from damage and theft. For damage-control, I like to get 2x2 cardboard coin-flips or tubes for my coins, and Air-tites for my bars and rounds. Tubes and coin flips are very cheap, and you can easily label them without damaging the coin. Coin-flips have an added bonus becuase you can wrap and label them individually and store them in nifty boxes. Air-tites are a bit more expensive, but they offer excellent protection against the elements.