Stretch Your Holiday Dollar With eBay Buying

The Holiday buying season is fast approaching. For many people money is tight. And I'm sure all of us want to get the most bang for our buck. Fortunately, there are savvy ways to stretch your holiday dollar by using eBay. In fact, the secret I'm about to reveal will work anytime of the year but is especially helpful now.

Let's start by setting out exactly how people find gifts to buy on eBay. Most item auctions are found on eBay by doing a keyword search. So when a buyer arrives on the eBay site they type in what they are looking for and hit the search button. Next, the eBay search feature goes out a finds auctions that match the request and produces a list of potentials. The buyer then slowly scrolls through this list and bases much of their shopping on what's produced.

Now let's say that the buyer types a misspelled search word, like "labtop". The search engine will bring up auctions with matching terms but at the top of the list it will say "did you mean 'laptop'?" The buyer is then given the opportunity to click on a link that will take them to a list of auctions with the correct search phrase.

Its in this way that eBay protects buyers from spelling errors. However, if we put the shoe on the other foot eBay has no such safety net for sellers misspellings. This equals an incredible opportunity to save money.

You see, each day hundreds of eBay sellers list auctions with spelling errors. The errors are frequently in both the title and in the description. eBay does not spell check these areas and alert the sellers before they list. Consquently, there are thousands of auctions with misspellings in any given week.

Here's how you can benefit: Because most buyers use the keyword search tool to find auctions of interest to them. Frequently, auctions with misspellings are never found. Thus, if they are never found or found by a relatively few shoppers, competition will be much less for that item. And here's the beauty: Less competition (less demand) equals lower price. So the trick is finding the auctions with misspellings so you can swoop in buy these items at BARGAIN prices.

Fortunately there are eBay misspelling tools available. These tools will take the word or phrase you're searching for and misspell it in multiple ways and then submit all the misspellings to the eBay search tool. The results can be a veritable treasure trove of bargains.