How to benefit from typos on eBay ? Use Typotrawler.

Filed in archive Start-Ups on September 12, 2007

Typos can be very nasty, making you look bad. Therefore most people use spellcheckers on their computers. When people sell stuff on ebay, things get a little bit different. Typos are killing on eBay : people looking for a laptop won't find you if you have typed latop. Stupid !

But there's another aspect that interests me. Money is to be made from everything. So how can you make use of other people's typos ? Well, people don't bid on misspelled items as they typically can't find them. That's where Typotrawler comes in. It can identify and list misspelled items on ebay so you can easily bid on them. And you can probably buy stuff at a better price just because of lesser bids on the item. It's so simple, yet so powerful.

Typotrawler is not the first one to do this. Fat Fingers does a similar thing, but according to TypoTrawler, they do a better job :

The users influence the content that is displayed on TypoTrawler by voting on which items are poorly spelled (and result in a bargain!) and which items our robots shouldn't have bothered showing you.(TypoTrawler)

We could have a winner here.