One of the least exploited ways of making money on eBay is to buy misspelled eBay items with the intention of relisting them so that they sell for a higher price. This process is known as eBay arbitrage and can be an excellent way to make money as it does not require large quantities of stock to be held. Read on for details of the tools you need and the steps to take to profit from other peoples eBay misspellings.
Many people looking to earn extra money turn to eBay and rightly so. With millions of eager buyers looking for bargains it’s certainly the place to dispose of any unwanted items that you may have laying around the house. But what do you do when you’ve cleared the attic of unneeded junk ?
One solution is to buy products from a supplier or wholesaler and sell these on eBay – this is what virtually all of the eBay Shops do. Although this can be an excellent way to make money, the drawback of this technique is that you need to have some money to invest in stock as well as the room to store the items that you’re selling. That’s not good if you’re already short of money !
But is there another way to make money on eBay that doesn’t require lots of stock ?
Currently the most profitable and presently least exploited method involves buying an item on eBay at a low price and then relisting and selling it back on eBay at a higher price, a process known as eBay arbitrage. With so many items for sale at any one time, eBay offers some excellent arbitrage opportunities, as long as you know how to find them.
So where do you look ? The answer is everywhere and anywhere on eBay because it’s not where you search but how you search that matters !
Allow me to explain….
With the sheer number of items listed on eBay it’s not surprising that some listings contain spelling mistakes. What’s even more surprising is that it’s usually the item brand name in the eBay auction title that is misspelled by the seller. Because of these misspelled words these items don’t appear when potential buyers search for the correct spelling of the brand name. As a result, these misspelled eBay items are seen by less people, get less bids and usually sell for less.
So the first step to making money on eBay via eBay arbitrage is to find these misspelled eBay auctions and that’s where Missing-Auctions.com can help. As the leading misspelled eBay auction search engine, it will allow you to find these misspelled eBay items. All you need to do is to enter the correctly spelled brand name (Abercrombie, Motorola or Playstation are always safe bets) and it will scour eBay for you locating all of the misspelled versions of this brand name.
Once you’ve found a misspelled item on eBay you’ll need to work out how much you might have to pay for it as well as how much it could sell for if correctly listed. Both of these questions can be answered by searching the completed auction listings on eBay for identical items to the one that you have found, something is easily done using Missing-Auctions.com.
If the difference in price is big enough then it’s worth bidding on the item. Should you win the item then you simply need to relist it, correctly spelled, and ensure that you sell it for more than you paid for it.
For a more detailed description of the eBay arbitrage process check out the free eBay arbitrage ebook on Missing-Auctions.com which gives you step-by-step instructions and tips on how to make sure that your relisted item reaches the highest price possible. There’s also a free weekly list of commonly misspelled brand names that should help you to uncover plenty of bargains.
So there you have it ! Ebay arbitrage is a fun and exciting way to earn money on eBay without having to buy and store large amounts of stock. What are you waiting for ? Profit from other peoples spelling mistakes on eBay today !
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I am left wondering if we are maybe dealing with the worst end of ebay sellers when it comes to looking for misspelled auctions. Could it be that their illiteracy is a sign of something more sinister? Instead of going to school and applying themselves to learning, were many of them instead operating under a different credos? The one that has as it’s slogan, ‘Do unto others what you think you can get away with’.
Since dealing with misspelt auctions (about a week now), I have won 5 items. 3 have not yet been delivered but may turn up. 1 turned out to be a factory second which was described as, “In excellent condition” and another auction was cancelled by ebay AFTER I had paid for the item. As far as the factory second is concerned I am down £13 and trying to get my money back. As far as the cancelled auction is concerned I am down £100 and it looks as though I am going to need to get the police involved.
Since making purchases on ebay over the last 5 years, I have very rarely had a problem. It may be something other than pure coincidence which leads to my latter experience of being ripped off, but I kind of doubt it.
There may well be a greater link between illiteracy and the criminally minded that we are aware of. I warn all of you to be very careful in this area of ebay. If my experience is anything to go by, you are looking at at least 2 out of every 5 auction wins turning into nothing but loss and trouble.
Thanks for your comment Mark – it’s certainly an interesting correlation that you suggest and, oddly enough, I was planning a blog post on whether misspelled items are scams or not.
My gut feeling is that you may simply have been unlucky. In my experience all of the misspelled items that I have bought over the years have been as a result of carelessness by the seller rather than anything else.
Looking back at the auctions, is there anything else about the listings that may have triggered some alarm bells at all ? Did they have low feedback, only accept cash etc ?
If you paid by Paypal you should be covered although there is the inevitably hassle of pursuing your claims.
It may be running the auction items through one of my other sites called Auction-Follow.com. It allows you to follow items by emails AND sends you an email report to let you know if the item is likely to be a scam.
It does this by checking the seller history, location, payment methods accepted, auction duration and checks against a list of 4,500 known scammers websites.
Quoted from above:
“Looking back at the auctions, is there anything else about the listings that may have triggered some alarm bells at all ? Did they have low feedback, only accept cash etc ?”
I guess you could say that a feedback level of 5 is “low”, but the item from that seller has arrived and is exactly what it is meant to be.
The seller who sold me a piece of junk has a feedback score of 965 and 99.5% rating. So there seem to be no hard-and-fast rules here.
Maybe I did just get unlucky but there may be something in the correlation I alluded to above. If the struggling pupil finds little purpose or hope in the idea of achieving academic success, is it not plausible that being incapacitated in the race towards the glittering prizes he, or she may be tempted by the idea of monetary gain through the spoils of bluff and banter? Ebay could look like a good stomping ground for those that apply themselves deviously. And just because someone is barely legible, it doesn’t mean that they are short of the capacity to think up ruses of one kind or another.
Perhaps, if the government actually cared as much as it pretends to, these individuals, who have fallen through the cracks in the floorboards of our creeking educational system, would not now find themselves in the dire situation of being unable to find gainful employment. This takes on an even greater significance now that the banker’s have wrecked the economy. Where there was slim chance before – now there is practically none.
But of course, I know that not everyone who has done badly at school has automatically turned into a criminal. Indeed, it may not be a lack of schooling that is at fault, so much as a lack of loving guidance.
No doubt things will get better when I am made Pope, or become your future benevolent dictator.
I’m glad to see that you haven’t lost your sense of humour !
And don’t get me started on the state of the country (I’m guessing that you too, like me, are based in the UK).
Yes I am based in the UK. If it can still be called the UK now that the European Union is a fait accompli. We are now the European UK.
It’s a pity I am not an atrocious speller. If I were, I might spell Europe with an initial ‘Y’. I could then claim with distain to be based in the YUK.
Thank you Phil, for the link to http://www.auction-follow.com
You have created another very useful website. This is going to help a lot as far as reducing risk is concerned.
The only thing that I would like to be different, is that instead of getting 2 emails, I just get one email containing the information which is in both.
This would make filing a lot easier.
I will try do the same in my blog.