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How misspelled eBay items can save you a small fortune

By ama | December 1, 2008

It's not widely known but a significant number of eBay sellers consistently fail to check their auction listings before they submit them to eBay.  Sometimes these spelling mistakes 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 characters).  More usually these typos are due to carelessness or a basic inability to spell.

But why is this important ?

Because unless someone searching on eBay for a particular item happens to misspell their search word in exactly the same way then these misspelled auction items are unlikely to be found.

Up until recently the only way that these misspelled auctions could be located was by wading through the auction listings one at a time.

Thankfully there is another way to locate these misspelled auctions: one that’s been used successfully by tens of thousands of bargain hunters over the last year and it’s to use a third party web site to search for eBay misspellings called Auction-Fatfingers.com.

This specialized search engine works by taking a correctly spelled word or brandname, deliberately misspelling it in a number of ways and then submitting these misspellings to eBay.  Any misspelled auctions containing 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 eBay auction typos are usually quite tricky to find they attract less bids. This means that misspelled auctions generally sell for less than the same item which is spelled correctly, if they sell at all.  So while these stupid typos cost the sellers money they mean that you, the purchaser, can grab a real bargain.

If you’re smart you can even relist the misspelled items that you purchase (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 pick up.

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