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Win Auctions With Lower
Bids by Exploiting People's Mistakes
If an item in an auction gets fewer
people looking at it
then it will get fewer bids and hence go for less money. So
all you need to do is find these items that people are not
looking at.
**
Each day literally thousands of items are listed on eBay.
Some of these items will have mistakes in the way they are
listed and will not be picked up in searches. All you need
to do is find the items that are listed incorrectly and win
them with lower bids.
**
Method 1 - item listed with spelling mistakes
**
Search for what you want using spelling mistakes. There are
a number of ways spelling mistakes can be made, but we will
look at the 4 most common here.
**
First, word spelt with a letter missing. For example, camera
would be amera, cmera, caera, camra, camea and camer.
**
Second, word spelt with 2 letters swapped around. For
example, camera would be acmera, cmaera, caemra, camrea and
camear.
**
Third, key on the left of the key to be pressed is hit.
For example, if 'n' is hit instead of 'm'. With camera this
would lead to xamera, canera, camwra and cameea.
**
Fourth, key on the right of the key to be pressed is
hit. For example, if 'v' is hit instead of 'c'. With camera
this would lead to vamera, csmera, camrra, cameta and
camers.
**
Obviously it would take too long to search for each
misspelling. Fortunately, eBay has a search feature that is
not commonly known where you can search for more than one
word/phrase at the same time. Have all the words/phrases
separated by commas and the whole list enclosed in brackets.
**
In our example above you would search for (amera, cmera,
caera, camra, camea, camer) when checking for missing
letters. At the time of writing this search turned up 275
results.
**
Method 2 - item not mentioned in the title
**
Always search in titles and descriptions and look for items
where the search term is not in the title.
**
Method 3 - item listed in the incorrect category
**
Look in unusual categories. In the search results on the
left is listed the 'Matching Categories'. Click on
the unusual categories to find less visited items.
**
Method 4 - item ends when few users are using auction site
**
Look for items that finish on a weekday in the middle of
the day or any day in the middle of the night. The times are
those in America as most Internet users are from America.
**
Most bids are placed on an item when it is first listed and
when it is about to end. If an item is due to end on a
weekday (people at work) or in the middle of the night
(people asleep) then it will receive fewer bids as there
will be less people using eBay.
**
Method 5 - item not listed in gallery
**
look for items that are not listed in the gallery (no
photo in the search results). Items not in the gallery
generally end with lower bids than items in the gallery.
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How To Find Everything You Are Looking For
**
Sometimes if you just search for what you want you may not
get all the items that are of interest to you. Sometimes the
user may mistakenly forget to put all the relevant words in
the decsription and/or the title.
**
For example, if you want to find a Minolta camera and you
search for 'Minolta camera'. Some items may have the word
camera in it but not the word Minolta so you will not find
them.
**
The way to solve this problem is first to search for a more
general term on the search page. For 'Minolta camera' search
for 'camera' instead of 'Minolta camera'.
**
In the results returned take note of the terms you do not
want such as: digital, Olympus, JVC, Kodak then go back to
the search page. Put the terms in the words to exclude box
and make the search again.
**
Repeat the above until you find the items you desire. This
method will find more items you want and find items that
less people have looked at and so need a smaller bid to win.
************************************************************
Author: Muhammad Hassan, the webmaster of the innovative free search tool
at http://lowbiditems.com.
Search eBay, Yahoo and Amazon auctions from just 1 form and quickly find
items with spelling errors and lower bids.
Copyright (c) 2003, Muhammad Hassan. All rights reserved.
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