I have begun a home-based buying/reselling business of sorts by taking advantage of the carelessness others. Careless sellers. Sellers either too busy, too impatient or just plain careless about eBay. Now I understand that not everyone really cares about making top dollar for their products; it's about cleaning out the closet. And that's fine. And I know that not everyone can beautifully describe an article of clothing or put the perfect layout background to a hubcap auction. That's fine, too. It's the sellers who are selling an item with a brand name, a company logo or similar identifier who don't bother to include that name in their title. I have found tremendous bargains locating very expensive items buried in the noise of a particular category because the seller has not listed his item properly.

There are those sellers who, I guess, try to do it right. They list the manufacturer's name in the title. Sort of. They've incorrectly spelled the name, so the lion's share of searchers for their item won't bring up the listing if the searcher's keyword is the company name spelled correctly. Searching for an item by not-spelling-the-company-name-quite right has brought me tremendous deals on items which I then turn around and sell for a profit. Looking for a Hummel figurine, for example, by searching for Hummell. There are currently 5700 more items listed with the name spelled correctly than not. This, of course, means that there are much fewer choices for me in the misspelled listings. But there are also thousands of fewer potential bidders for these items as well. It's a good gamble. The more letters in a company's name or the more unusual the spelling, the more possible misspellings. It's hard to believe what some folks will do with names like Royal Daulton and Crown Staffordshire...

I used to email folks who were incorrectly listing their items. I probably sent out over a hundred emails over the course of a month. I started thinking that this wasn't my job. Sellers are responsible for the content of the listing, and if folks were going to be careless (even with the manufacturer's name right in front of them), I was going shopping.

Sellers beware. I'm watching.

Buyers, be creative in your searching. There's buried treasure out there.