Don't be daft Brian, I can hear you say!



Can you really buy something on eBay, and then sell it back on eBay and make money?

You certainly can. You see, it's all in the price.

If you buy an item for a particular price, and then sell it for a higher amount, you've made yourself a profit.

And one of the best ways to locate items which sell for low amounts is to take advantage of misspellings.

Not everyone is as diligent as you when it comes to listing their items for sale on eBay. They make mistakes. Sometimes very simple spelling errors. And it is these mistakes which can enable you to net a real bargain.

You are helped because the vast majority of eBay buyers use the simple search box to find items of interest. They probably don't realise but by using this search box, the keywords they input are only getting checked against auction titles. This means that if the seller has made a spelling mistake in the title of their auction, they won't get returned in search results.

If they don't get returned in search list, then bidders can't click through to read the auction description. The result of a misspelling can be a neglected auction.

And this can be YOUR opportunity to step in and get a bargain.

This probably works best on brand names which have been given incorrect spellings in auction titles.

For example, today I searched on eBay for electric products made by Remington.

But I didn't key remington into the search box, I used remmington. Note the double m spelling. Note too that capital letters are treated identically to lower case in eBay searches.

Of the 63 items in the search return list, 23 were for Remington products (or remmington as these sellers called them).

And of the 23 Remington items, only 5 had bids on them. This isn't surprising as very few bidders will ever find them!

On this list there were several Remington products which I could pick up for next to nothing. And then, with the correct spellings of course, I could list them back on eBay and look forward to making a nice profit.

Just one word of advice if you're going to try this technique. Do make sure you place a bid on any items of interest. This is because the seller can de-list their item before the end of the auction period if there are no bids. And if they realise there have been a low number of viewers they might discover their error and try and remove their auction.

Now you say, how on earth am I going to know all the misspellings of items I might want to buy?

That's a good question.

But here's a better answer....

You simply use some free services I'm going to tell you about. Use these to search and locate all those misspelled auction titles.

Typically, these programs take your legitimate word, such as Remington, and search eBay for auctions which contain any spelling derivation of the key word.

Then, you can usually go straight to these auctions to check them out!

If sellers have been too lazy to use correct spellings in their auction titles, these free tools are very useful in track downing those potentially rewarding errors.

Here is where you can find three such services:

http://www.vbbitman.com/

http://www.cooqy.com/

http://www.bestwebauctions.net/