When Holly Marshall wanted to sell a pair of dangling earrings, a popular style these days, she listed them on eBay once, and got no takers. She tried a second time, and still no interest.Was it the price? The fuzzy picture? Maybe the description: a beautiful pair of chandaleer earrings.
Such is the eBay underworld of misspellers, where the clueless � and sometimes just careless � sell labtop computers, throwing knifes, Art Deko vases, camras, comferters and saphires.
The quote is from a New York Times article (free registration required) that I wrote about last year. The point of it being that if people are getting little or no interest on what they're offering, then they might be willing to take a low bid. You can get some real bargains that way.
You could search for misspellings on eBay's site manually, but it'd be tough to think of every possible way words or phrases could be mangled. Automation to the rescue: Fat Fingers will calculate most of the permutations (doubled and transposed letters; also common typing errors) and search for them. I just did a search for "Xbox" and got over 230,000 returns. Most of those have clearly nothing to do with an Xbox or games or accessories for it, but you can edit them out and narrow the list down to manageable numbers.
Comments (8)
My husband collects old "Minic" British wind up cars. Many times he's gotten a bargain because someone has mispelled it as "mimic" :)
Posted by Robyn | September 9, 2005 5:17 AM
Posted on September 9, 2005 05:17
And now I've made him a wealthy man. Curses!
Remember that if his riches fade I will be here for you.
More or less.
It's a day-to-day kind of thing.
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