There is a business called eBooBoos whose sole business model is to find auction items on eBay that are misspelled (eBay does not have a spell checker). The idea is that when items are misspelled, people will not be able to find them, and therefore, they will be priced too low.
Another example of the ridiculous range of businesses that exist.
(Source: Marginal Revolution)
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5 comments:
Just came across your post, I use a similar service, although from a different company called AuctionPixie.
The one I use is pretty much the same with a few more features - I think it looks prettier too, lol.
Many businesses exist soley to expose the flaws in other actual businesses. Many times, for example, clothing manufacturers will have wearhouses that sell slightly damaged goods. There are appliance companies that sell only slightly damaged goods--perfectly functioning, yet not as asthetically pleasing: not as beautiful and flawless as exact replicas. I think this company (eBooBoos) is a more of a convience factor for ebayers who actually want the lowest priced goods without having to wait an auction out. It is basically a simple service to catch the mistakes and errors of ebay. It is a good thought, but i dont think as a business it will actually survive.
--Alena
It is not uncommon for many busineses to find some (though often little success) in spoofs and mistakes of other businesses. Discount stores such as TJ Max make their business simply by purchasing all the unwanted or flawed items from high priced deparment stores at a next to nothing price and then turning around and selling these clothes or other items at a price much lower than before. To relate to this eBooBoos, some companies online can attribute their sucess to a consumer's typo on a keyboard. Many companies often have urls with names created by misspelling a popular name of a website. These companies use this mistake to obtain exposure to their company and their products or services.
-Nick W
this website is funny. but like alena said, i dont think that it will last. a lot of people these days don't want slightly damaged goods, or knock-offs. today more and more people are willing to pay alot to get, for example, a real designer purse. also, stores liek tj max can make money because stores sell them the damaged goods for a very low price, and tj max raises the price, as nick said. but even with a low price tj max is still profiting becuase it probabaly took $5 to make a shirt that was sold at abercrombie for 50 dollars and then sold at tj max for $20. and after playing around a little bit on ebooboos.com i noticed that a lot of people on ebay spell things wrong, which is just sad.
-carolyn
You folks are completely missing the point of ebooboos. The site is not in the business of selling "knock offs" or "slightly irregular" items. Instead, it exposes auctions in which the seller had made a spelling mistake when they listed the item. This is genius! By entering the correctly spelled item, ebooboos is hunting down misspelt variations and exposing them. On ebay itself, it would take quite a long time to perform a search for each individual misspelt word that ebooboos is performing in one shot.
The advantage? People that are searching for the correctly spelt word on ebay are never seeing these flawed auctions. The merchandise itself is not flawed, just the way the seller listed the item. The fewer the people that see an auction, the less the competition and the better my chances of picking the item up at a great price.
As far as a business, I don't see how ebooboos even makes any money. It appears to be just a free service, so I don't see how it could fail as others have pointed out.
I'm glad I ran across this article. I've been using ebooboos ever since and have picked up some great deals that I am reposting on ebay correctly to make some extra cash.
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