Mighty Bargain Hunter

A $503,000 typo?

September 19th, 2007 | by mbhunter |

EBay’s search function is a useful tool for buyers to locate auctions of interest. It will even search for plural forms if you enter the singular form in the search box (listings containing “dimes” will show up if you search for “dime”).

But if the seller misspells a key term in the title, a lot of would-be buyers might not find the auction. I had heard of one buyer who bought a box of “geres” for a few dollars and sold them as “gears” for a few hundred dollars. So, as a buyer, if you can catch auctions that are poorly spelled, you may be able to get a really good deal.

I received an e-mail talking about a new eBay typo finder called TypoTrawler.com. (This one’s neat. The typo auctions flow down the screen and you can vote on whether the misspelling is useful or not in order to help train the engine and make the tool better for everyone.) Anyway, on their blog this week they posted an article about an Allsopp’s Arctic Ale bottle that was listed, sold, re-listed, and re-sold. The first sale price was for $304 plus $19.95 shipping — not too bad.

The buyer, collectordan, relisted the bottle a couple of months later with some extra verbiage in the auction, ten more pictures, and correct spelling of the name of the company. The first auction had listed the bottle as “Allsop’s” when it actually was spelled correctly, as “Allsopp’s.” The second auction did better. Much better. The bottle sold this time around for $503,300!

Although it’s true that the first auction misspelled the name of the brewing company, and collectordan didn’t, I doubt that the first seller knew that the bottle was that valuable. This bottle is probably the oldest full, sealed bottle of beer in existence. I think this realization was lost on the first seller and caught by collectordan, and that collectordan capitalized handsomely on this diamond in the rough.

It’s exciting to think that a typo could hide a gem that could be sold for a six-figure profit like this beer bottle. Typos do reduce the number of bidders on an item, but this bottle was listed in the correct categories, so it wasn’t totally hidden from interested bidders. I’ve seen auctions that have deliberate misspellings in the titles, like “WIRELESS WiFi COMPAQ laptop notebook labtop lab top XP,” that catch more bidders!

Fixing the typo was a contributing factor to the half-million-dollar price tag, but not the only factor. A good, well-written description helped. Extra pictures helped. But above all, knowing that the item was a unique, irreplaceable piece of history sealed the deal. Knowledge of the item was the dominant deciding factor here.

Happy bargain hunting! May all of your finds net you a 165,459% profit like this one!