Thursday, August 16, 2012

How to Strike Gold Hunting Out misspelled eBay auction items on eBay


With over 167 million registered users eBay is the largest square in the world. Tens of thousands of items are listed every day and the vast majority of these do not contain spelling mistakes. But a significant percentage do, both in the title or description.

Now I'm sure you're thinking, 'so why do this?' Well, the answer is surprisingly simple - these misspelled auctions can not be found directly through eBay built-in search functions. To find them, you'll need to browse the category lists in hand, which is tedious and time consuming. How wrong result auctions get fewer bids and usually sell for less (if they sell at all).

If you're looking to pick up a bargain on eBay is great news, but if you want a simple way to make some extra money why not buy these misspelled items cheap and then sell them back at a profit. Talk about easy money! But how do you find them?

If you plan to use eBay built-in search system to find them you must manually create a list of all possible misspellings for your particular search term. Although this works, it's quite random, not to mention boring because there are four main categories of spelling errors.

First of all there are the obvious ways: the missing letters, typing the same letter twice and get two points down. But then there are the less obvious mistakes, like hitting a button next to the one you want. It seems simple enough right? As an example, let's look at 'computer' the word. Using the procedures described above mis-spelling of the word results in a list of 64 possible misspellings:

COMPUTER, cmputer, coputer, comuter, compter, compuer, computr, calculate, ccomputer, coomputer, commputer, compputer, compuuter, computter, computeer, computerr, fomputer, vomputer, COMPUTER, xomputer, domputer, c0mputer, cpmputer, clkmputer, cimputer, c9mputer, cokputer, conputer, cojputer, com-uter, comuter, comluter, comouter, com0uter, comp8ter, compiter, compjter, comphter, compyter, comp7ter, compu6er, compuyer, compuger, compufer, compurer, compu5er, comput4r, computrr, computdr, computwr, comput3r, compute5, computet, computef, calculated computee, compute4, ocmputer, cmoputer, copmuter, comupter, comptuer, compuetr, computre

Now, if you're thinking that there is no way that someone can misspelling a simple word like 'computer', that's a fact. At the time of writing, research on eBay.com using the list of results in 46 words results, many of whom had no bids at all because they were hidden from 'normal searchers'.

Even if you can generate a list of spelling errors by hand is quite tedious, especially as the list grows longer as the length increases search your texts. Fortunately, though, there's a much better way.

There are several websites that automatically generates a list of misspelled words for you, all you have to do is supply the original phrase research and usually choose a site for searching eBay. However, most will look around the eBay site and this can be a problem because you get lots of lots of unrelated categories so my advice is to use a site such as missing-Auctions.com that allows you to restrict your search to a particular category of eBay.

So that's it. Whether you're just trying to pick up a bargain on eBay or are you looking for cheap items to sell at a profit again, searching for items misspelled auctions on eBay one of the leading third-party sites is the first research What you should do. You'll almost certainly save money! ...

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