eBay is a phenomenal success, all from a girl asking her geek boyfriend to write a website to sell her collection of Pez sweet dispensers! They are in the news today with a 40M Euro fine for allowing fake stuff to be sold on the site, but that's not what I am writing about! Normally I just use eBay to get rid of surplus stuff and buy new items like stationery that is cheaper there than going to a shop, even taking P&P into account.What I've been pondering, though, is how best to use fatfingers.co.uk. This is a very clever website, working on the assumption that a proportion of people cannot spell, or have fat fingers and just mis-type the word. So let's say you collect Wedgwood pottery. You go to this site, type in Wedgwood, use the dropdown to choose which eBay site and click the Find button. It then opens a new window in eBay with the result - all mis-spellings of Wedgwood in current auctions.
So, now you have auctions which by the vast majority of people (who know how to spell) will not find, and you should be able to get a bargain. Knowledge of your subject and how much you can resell for should reap its benefits, and then slip me a fiver in with my Christmas card please!
Now, if you really want to be clever, design a site that takes this further and finds a recently closed sale for the same item and compares the prices. By monitoring lots of auctions, it should be able to identify the very best bargains.
