It’s not widely known but a large proportion of eBay sellers regularly fail to check their auction listings before they submit them to eBay. Sometimes these auction typos are deliberate and arise because the sellers are trying to squeeze too much detail in to the auction title (eBay limits this to just 65 letters). More usually these typos are due to carelessness or a basic inability to spell.
But why does this matter ?
Because unless someone searching eBay for a particular item happens to misspell their search word in exactly the same way then these misspelled auctions are unlikely to be found.
Up until relatively recently the only way that these auction typos could be found was by looking through the auction listings line by line.
Thankfully there is another way to find these misspelled auctions: one that’s been used successfully by tens of thousands of bargain hunters over the twelve months and it’s to use a third party web site to search for eBay misspellings called Auction-Fatfingers.com.
This specialized search engine functions by taking a correctly spelled word or brandname, deliberately misspelling it in a number of ways and then submitting the list of misspellings to eBay. Any misspelled auction items matching any of the words on the list of misspellings will then be shown on eBay.
Sure it’s clever, but what is the point ?
The answer is amazingly simple ! Because these misspelled auctions are usually quite tricky to find they attract fewer bids. This means that misspelled items usually sell for less than the same item which is correctly spelled, if they sell at all. So while these stupid typing mistakes cost the sellers money they mean that you, the purchaser, can get a real bargain.
If you’re smart you can even relist any misspelled items that you buy (taking care to avoid introducing misspellings) in order to make a profit.
So what are you waiting for ? Why not head over to Auction-Fatfingers.com right now and try searching for ‘Abercrombie’, ‘Motorola’ or ‘Playstation’. You’ll be amazed at the bargains that you can find.
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