The Secrets of eBay “Typo Treasures”

Save up to 70% by searching for mispellings misspellings

The Problem

In a bricks-and-mortar retail store, you browse through the shelves and racks until you find the item you’re looking for.  Let’s say, for example, that you want a Sony PlayStation 3.  You would walk to the video games department of your favorite electronics store, and look around until you found the display of PS3 boxes.  Easy enough.

But eBay is different.  In most cases, browsing through a category for a particular item just isn’t practical, because of the sheer number of listings.  Again using our Playstation example, if you simply browsed eBay’s “Video Games” category, you’d find more than 613,000 items currently listed.

So what buyers do instead is use the Search tool built into eBay to find a more precise and manageable list of items.  Searching eBay for Sony PlayStation 3 system, for instance, yields about 580 listings–and you could get an even narrower list by specifying New, 80GB, etc.

And  there’s the challenge:  when it comes to searching, computers are very literal.  Their software is programmed to look for words in the listing titles that match your search terms exactly.

eBay knows that many buyers misspell keywords when they’re searching for an item, so they’ve added programming to suggest possible correct spellings if you inadvertently commit a typo.  For example, if you accidentally search eBay for palystation (transposing the second and third letters), eBay will helpfully ask, “Did you mean playstation?”

But there is no such help for the hapless seller who misspells, either out of ignorance or carelessness, a key word like the product’s brand name in their title.  eBay does not suggest or display misspellings to a buyer who searches for the correct spelling. Thus, if you list a “Palystation” for sale on eBay, the only buyers who will ever see it are those who explicitly search for that misspelling!

Bad for Sellers…But Great for Buyers

For a seller, this is disastrous.  The magic of an auction–whether live or on eBay–is in having dozens of people bid against each other to drive up the price.  But if only one or two bidders participate, there’s little or no competition, and the item may sell well under market value–possibly even for just the opening bid.  It’s as if the address for the location of a live auction was printed wrong in the newspaper advertisement, and instead of the expected crowd, only a couple of people show up because they found the location purely by accident.

(This is a great reason to use a professional eBay store like Easysale rather than trying to sell it yourself.  It’s one of the many kinds of errors that our listing staff is trained to avoid.)

But for you as a buyer, knowing how to exploit this little quirk can save you a lot of money.  If you intentionally search for those typos and misspellings, you can be one of those few people who find the auction–and with few competitors, you can often pick up a bargain.

How Much Can You Save?

To find out just how much you could possibly save with this strategy, Easysale performed a test.  We used a misspellings search tool–more on that in a moment–to generate many possible misspellings of PlayStation.  These included:

Note that one of these, Play Station, isn’t even a misspelling–there’s just a space between the two words, where there should be none–but that’s enough to fool eBay’s search engine.

We then used Terapeak (a subscription service that we use to do product research for our sellers) to find the average selling price (ASP) over the last 90 days for items matching each search term in the Video Game Systems sub-category.

As a reference point, listings that contained the properly spelled word–PlayStation–had an ASP of $140.  (Because we didn’t specify the system version, this average includes both the PS3 and older, less valuable systems like the PS2.)

What we found astounded even us as experienced eBay sellers:  the average selling prices of items with misspellings in the title were $20 to $100 less than the ASP for listings with the correct spelling.  Here’s a graph of the results; the ASP for correctly spelled listings is on the far left.

Just how much of a bargain is this?  Here are the results again, this time showing the effective percentage “discount” off of the “full price” of the properly spelled listing:

In a nutshell, you could get a 15-71% discount–at least in this example–just by shopping smart and taking advantage of sellers’ mistakes!

7 Tips for Finding Your Own Typo Treasures

1. Use software to find and search all the possible misspellings. Many people routinely search for Typo Treasures, so there are a number of of tools available that will take a correctly spelled word, generate many possible misspellings and search for them on eBay.  To get started, try the Typo Treasures Search page right here on the Easysale website.  Or to find some even more advanced tools, search Google for “eBay misspellings”.
2. Do your research so you don’t overbid.  As with any eBay purchase, be sure to research the ASP for listings with correctly spelled titles first.  Know what the market value of the item is, then set your maximum bid on any Typo Treasures at some percentage of that value.
3. Be patient.  You’re not the only one looking on the hunt for typos.  Stick to your maximum bid, and if you do get outbid by someone else who found the same listing, just go back to your search and try again.
4. Don’t ignore Buy It Nows.  The Typo Treasures strategy works best with auction-format listings, but watch for recently-listed Buy It Now (fixed price) listings with typos, too.  You may get lucky and find one with a below-market price before someone else stumbles on it.
5. Search eBay’s international sites.  Misspellings are more common on these sites due to the sellers’ frequent unfamiliarity with the English language.  But don’t forget to check the international shipping costs to be sure they don’t eat up your savings.
6. Watch for deliberate misspellings.  Unscrupulous sellers will often intentionally misspell a trademarked brand name when they’re selling a counterfeit or replica of that brand.  They do this to avoid detection by the trademark owner.  For example, if you search for Louis Vitton, you’ll find numerous items with titles such as “Louis Vitton Inspired” or “Louis Vitton Style”.  These items are replicas of the authentic Louis Vuitton designer products, not the real thing.  Read the listing carefully and be sure you know what you’re buying.
7. If you find a juicy misspelling, don’t tell the seller! It seems obvious, but well-intentioned people do it.  If the listing can still be revised, and the seller fixes the typo, then your “find” will now be visible again to everyone in mainstream search.

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