I am not a very good speller. This has always embarrassed me. When I was in college, my Dad used to return my letters with red mark ups because my spelling so unnerved him. I have improved over the years but still make lots of mistakes. I consistently misspell "church" as "crunch", which is very annoying when one teaches a religion class. Needless to say, I love, love, love, spell check despite its inability to catch incorrect usage such as the their, there, they're problem.
This brings us to to an interesting web site that uses the propensity of others to misspell to your advantage as an eBay consumer. Apparently if you misspell something when you list it, eBay doesn't fix it for you. So if you post clothing from Anthropologie but spell it anthropology (which is actually the correct spelling of the word, but not the brand), when someone searches under the brand name your item will not appear. So some smart person made a website called FatFingers.com You can go to this site and type in what you want and it will search it with a number of common misspellings. I tested it with the Anthropologie example. It came up with four pages of clothes with NO bids as opposed to searching directly on eBay with the correct brand spelling which brought up a bunch of pages with lots of bidding going on. What a great way to avoid competition. If I had wanted them, I could have gotten two nice skirts for only 99 cents. Nifty!
As far as ebay buying goes, a couple more ideas:
ReplyDelete1. Use a site like ebuyersedge.com to set up saved ebay searches so that you get emails when matching items are newly listed. You can do this on ebay as well, but they only send out 1 email per day at most. Ebuyersedge will check as often as every 5 minutes, immediately sending you an email when a new match is found, so you'd have the jump on other potential buyers/bidders.
This works best with 'Buy It Now's, but is also effective with auctions.
2. Whenever you send a question to a seller, use the "Ask a question" link that is on a page of another item they're selling that you're not interested in. This makes it a little less convenient for the seller to add your question and their answer to the description for the item that you're interested in.
3. Maybe send the seller an offer to end the auction early. All they can do is say no.
3. If you bid on an ebay auction, use a sniping service (www.hidbid.com, bidball.com, etc.) to avoid bidding wars, and hopefully save some money by not drawing early attention, and not giving manual 'nibbling' snipers a chance to react.