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I should know better than to have let this happen! I've even written articles in my
member's area teaching and preaching this as a big NO, NO on eBay. But thanks to my being
impatient and in a big hurry, I made a simple little mistake that ultimately cost me over
$500. What's bad is it took me just about 2 seconds to make this mistake and if I had
taken 3 more seconds to proofread myself, I could have saved this self-induced and
self-deserved penalty! I put a 926' roll of new electric wire up for auction a couple of weeks ago for a customer of mine. I was in a hurry to leave that day and wasn't really too hip on listing this item as I didn't think it was going to be successful in the first place. Reluctantly, I whipped up my listing/description page, took a couple of pictures, uploaded everything, wrote my title, hit the "begin listing now" button and away I went. He actually had 12 rolls of this wire so if this one worked, we had more to repeat again. I never even bothered to check in on the bid activity of this item which I had run for a 7 day auction. I had reserved the wire at $950 but the market price on it was actually over $2000 if you were to get it from a store. At the end of the auction, it brought the $950 reserve price. Hey, it met reserve but I wasn't to happy because my profit was whatever it made over reserve. In this case, my profit was zilch and I still had to pay the fees. I called my customer and told him the news and went through the normal motion of getting the money. I crated it up, shipped it out and the next day, went to relist again since we had more rolls. I paid a little more attention to the listing this time around. I noticed a couple of minor spelling errors in the description ( I know...stupid, since I have a spell checker) so I fixed them and proceeded to the review listing page where I had a startling discovery! I had the word "electric wire" in the listing title spelled WRONG!! I had spelled it "eletcric wire". I changed it and relisted the item...same reserve price, etc. The only thing I changed were the mis-spellings. Low and behold...seven days later and this same type of wire ended at $1,550!! I couldn't believe what I was seeing and how such a simple mistake could make such an impact on a listing. Since then, I've sold those rolls at one auction per week with each bringing right around $1,500. This really got me interested in how the whole spelling mistake thing works with ebay. Just imagine...the guy who bought my first roll could have easily relisted it on ebay and sold it for a handsome profit simply because he capitalized on my mistake. Basically, there were probably thousands of people that week looking for electric wire so when they typed that in the ebay search box, guess what......out of the many results they found, mine wasn't there. This meant, since it didn't show up in their search results, I didn't have a feeding frenzy of people able to see and bid on my item. I decided to dig around eBay and look for some way to find out where and how many people were listing items with spelling mistakes. I found some very basic ways of manually searching but it was nothing that really helped out. I kept digging and went outside of eBay to find some actual software programs designed to do this exact task! I checked out a few that were ok but finally settled on one that is right on the money. You would not believe the amount of items on a weekly basis that are being literally "stolen" for fractions of the real value just because people make a dumb spelling error. What's crazy is I also found out that many people selling on eBay use this as a means of getting their products! They only buy off of eBay and turn right around and sell the same stuff on eBay for a handsome profit! I've been selling on eBay for years and never even knew about this cool little niche market. I've had alot of fun playing with this software and oh my gosh the possibilities are endless! Here's a link to the website for the one I picked. It's called Misspell Generator and it's really neat! They show you some screen shots of how the software works for you to prove what kind of stuff is getting screwed up each week on eBay just because of spelling and grammar mistakes. Without sounding too corny, I have to say this software is cool. I feel like a kid with a new toy that my mom didn't want me to have! I'm going to pick a few items to try this with and see how well I can do with and item or two...or more ;-) When you click to their site, be sure to pay close attention
to the testimonials. The people explain in detail the types of products they found, for
what price and what misspelled word they found it under.
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