If you trust the buzz out there, eBay sellers aren’t smarter than a fifth grader, and you can make big bucks off their lack of spelling skills. The news recently was reeling over one eBayer’s discovery of the rarest beer on the world: the sharp-eyed bidder got a bottle for around $300 due to a misspelling in the beer’s name, then resold it with a high bid of $503,000. The promise of almost half a million dollars in profit is intriguing (even though the high bidder backed out), but the risk of underselling yourself by forgetting ‘i before e’ hasn’t slowed down the practice of misspelled auction words.
When I started selling on eBay in the late 90s, I did understand the benefit of proper spelling — but I also understood that, if seller’s can’t follow rules of language, buyers are probably just as bad. When I listed a C-band satellite receiver, I peppered the description with misspellings like “sattelite,” “reciever,” “sattellite“, and so on. Whenever I sold a Commodore C64, that listing was guaranteed to have “comoddore” or “comodore” in it. In my opinion, it helped — if you’re items show up in more searches, you’re going to get more potential buyers. I didn’t skip the proper spellings, though; sometimes people aren’t spelling-handicapped. If anybody thought they were taking advantage of a misspelling rube, well, at least I made my sale.
A cottage industry has sprouted up to support the buyer/resellers wishing to follow in the footsteps of Mr. Half-A-Million-Beer. Software can take a properly-written search query and search eBay for the most misspelled permutations of those words. For example, I put ‘laptop’ into one of these, and the software searched eBay for variations such as aptop, lptop, latop, lapop, laptp, lapto, alptop, lpatop, etc., etc. etc. It actually did come up with some “good” auctions, some items significantly underpriced. It appears there’s only a few algorithms for generating misspelled words, because the several I tested all came back with the same listings. eBay, in hopes of expanding their reach on the internet, open up their software to outside programmers and allow them to write new programs to access eBay’s listings. These services, then, profit from their eBay affiliate links through the search results. Other people have developed 
lower-tech options, selling services and instructional manuals on how to do the searching yourself, or with the help of software.
I’d advise caution using misspelled searches as a primary mode of finding items on eBay, though. Those widely underpriced auctions I found for laptops didn’t just have misspellings: they had several other hallmarks of an unreliable seller. I can excuse misspellings here and there, but listings from sellers with zero feedback, whose eBay username is a mishmosh of random letters, who say they’ll only take personal checks or money orders, and then — of course — the auction sounds too good to be true? Digging for misspellings is going to be more likely to pull up seedier sellers; if I could figure out to use misspellings in my listings to attract buyers who can’t spell, it seems likely that eBay scammers would use that to their advantage as well. This isn’t to disparage sellers with genuine listings and a few misspellings — that’s where a buyer can come out ahead — but I think it’s wise to remember that if you’re seeking out for poorly-written listings, you might end up with a poorly-handled purchase. The wide use of the services, as well, reduces the likelihood of being the only person seeing a misspelled listing, which defeats the purpose of using the program.
If you haven’t tried any of these yet, here’s a handful to test out; Like I said, they all lead to the same place and handle their searches similarly, but each has a slightly different interface and one might suit your tastes better:
A search on Google for “ebay misspelling” will turn up oodles of competitors — as well as searches for ebay mispelling, misspeling, and mispeling. These guys got it all covered!
