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Bad Spelling Pays on eBay
peebeejay writes "People say that as long as they're understood, spelling is unimportant. These people are unwittingly making others a lot of money online, according to this article in the NY Times (DNA sample and clean boxers required). So, aside from clarity and respect for your reader, there's another good reason to either spell correctly or use a spellchecker: get bidders to find your eBay items and give you their money! Or you can go ahead and see how many people bid on your 'labtop computers,' 'camras,' and 'earings.'"
I've been using this trick since I started using eBay, something like six years ago. When you look for something, always look for misspellings first, because you're less likely to have competition. Even got a gemstone or two this way.
It's been known for years, and it hasn't changed much. I don't think this article is going to cause much of a change, even if it's widely read.
Is the glass half empty? Is the glass half full? No! The glass is simply too big! What ever happened to rewarding those who did things well, as opposed to making sure nobody gets their feelings hurt because they don't do something as well as someone else. I heard that in some schools they're not running spelling bees anymore because it makes the kids that don't win feel too bad.
Some years ago I purchased a 36 gigabyte 10,000 RPM Fiber Channel drive very inexpensively on e-bay. Drives like it were selling for two or three hundred dollars and I paid $40 for mine. Why? Because I intially spelled Fiber Channel as fibre channel.
There were two or three fiber channel products with british spelling and I think I was the only one that even bid on them.
I was looking for a BikeE recumbent bike. There weren't any on Ebay. I tried "Bike-E" with a hyphen. There was an almost brand new demo model listed for $500. (They retailed for about $1200 at the time, I think.) I bought it, didn't even take it out of the box, relisted it with the correct spelling, and sold it for $850 seven days later. (I did have to pay for the bike to be shipped to me, which was about $35, I think.) I have also found that you can buy items that are poorly described and relist them with more thorough descriptions, links to the manufacturer's website, better photos, etc., and they will typically sell for higher than you paid for them.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
That having been said, I wound up with a MITS Altair for $100 because it was listed as "Vintage Altar Comp", and a "sonydcv1" for about $300.
My point being that as geeks, we should encourage all non-geeks we know who have an interest in selling items on eBay to forgo spellchecks and not worry about spelling in general. We stand to profit from it! Any attempt to educate the general populace (as this NYT article attempts to do) will reduce the number of magic bargains to be found on eBay ;)
Almost always a good deal in that category.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
A story on Slashdot about accurate spelling! And referring to eBay no less! Oh, the irony!
This is the first article about eBay where the editors haven't spelt (yes, "spelt" not "spelled") the company name as "Ebay".
Somehow, they alway (well, almost always) manage to correctly spell iMac, iPod and iTunes, but eBay, nVidia and ATi often become "Ebay", "Nvidia" and "ATI". It would be nice to think that this article was the start of a trend but I seriously doubt it.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
It's not just spelling that causes inter-generational confusion...
My father asked me to buy him a PC, so I ordered him a nice little Dell desktop. The look on his face when I took it over to his house was priceless - it turns out he wanted a laptop! He's always had a laptop from his company, and to him PC == laptop.
I understand that the definition of PC includes both desktop and laptop, but I think most people would assume PC == desktop.
Luckily I managed to sell the desktop on to a friend, and my father got his laptop a few weeks later...
I remember back in the early days of the web, when it was just becoming popular, that John Dvorak hailed it as the coming of true mass literacy. His belief was that with so many average every day citizens posting web pages, surely this would lead to increased literacy.
It couldn't have been a year later that he retracted that prediction and instead said that the web has proven just how illiterate Americans (and I presume others) are.
Anyway, just thought I'd toss in my little anecdote.
You gotta watch those typos, knowing how much fraud is on Ebay. I declined to bid on a low priced laptop because the S&H was $1500, not $15.00, and I didn't hear back from the seller until after the auction closed. No way I was going to take that chance. Too bad, because the final price was good (maybe others also declined to bid),
Just as importantly, it wasn't reinforced. Kind of like the lady who felt reassured by seeing "chandaleer" on hundreds of web sites, people whose reading consists primarily of web pages, e-mail, and chat (rather than books vetted by proofreaders) are learning to spell incorrectly. It's like the blind leading the blind. I've got nothing against spelling changes in principle; language is going to evolve. But this seems more like a case of language forking, almost geometrically.
Ironically, the internet seems to be taking us back a few centuries, to the days before English spellings were standardized by the likes of Webster and other lexicographers. Which was fine back when all parsing of text was done by humans, who could easily figure out that "Thomas Smith" and "Tomas Smythe" were the same person. But as this article points out, it can be a problem when more literal computers are concerned.
Except that the article is about people taking advantage of those mispellings and reselling the items for a profit. It is a good article except for the people who do it because now everybody will know. Just like Ebay used to be a great place for bargains until it became popular and now most things seem to end up higher than buying it at a reputable retailer.
That's not leeching. If somebody cannot be bothered to get a dictionary and look up the correct spelling of a word when they want to put out an advertisement that could be seen by millions of people, then to my mind they deserve what they get. You play with fire, you get burned.
You might not get far appearing on TV if you're ugly, and you might not get far on the wireless if you have an annoying voice. But anyone can learn to spell properly -- the only thing stopping them is laziness.
Actually there probably is a market for someone to charge a fee for checking spelling and usage {that would require a human being; a machine can spot "tehre" but "their" is a correctly-spelt word even if you meant "there"} -- because at some point, the benefit due to proper spelling would be greater than the amount you spent on it.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Not to mention the quality of news you get from the NYTimes for free and how painless it is to register.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.