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Typos Can Be Costly on Ebay
 Typos can be quite costly on eBay. A seller made a mistake listing a valuable beer in an eBay auction as "Allsop" instead of the correct name "Allsopp." A knowledgeable beer person going by the eBay username collectordan bought the beer for the very cheap price of $304 and then went on to sell it in another eBay auction for $503,300 - a profit of over $500,000.
This happened because the original seller stupidly made a typo in the listing, which happens rather frequently on eBay. In this particular case, he listed "ALLSOPP" as "ALLSOP", which means that his item would not be returned by users making a search for ALLSOPP items. You'd think people who are about place to an item for sale on eBay would at least ensure that the items are properly listed. I mean, it doesn't take that much effort to read a small paragraph at least thrice.
Taking advantage of this typo, one guy won the auction for a mere $400 and went on to resell the item for a staggering $500,000+.
Here is the first auction listing and here is the second one. As you can see the lack of a "p" in the first listing ended up being very costly. There's a special search engine from Branica (details here) that is supposed to help people catch typos like this one. Gizmag mentions a similar tool called Auction Intelligence. Tools like these can be used by buyers to find good deals and by sellers to correct potentially expensive mistakes like the one above. Proofreading is clearly an essential eBay skill. (via Luxist)
Posted on September 19, 2007
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