Just Like You Learned in School, Spelling Counts
Written by Kelley Hopper on January 2nd, 2010Today I was looking for some new shoes on eBay and came across the ones I wanted. The seller listed them as Reebox instead of Reebok so when I did a search for Reebok I couldn’t find them. This is a common mistake many sellers make but it can be a win for the buyer.
Right now on eBay there are 126 listings spelled Reebox and 44,316 items spelled Reebok. Do a search for Reebox on Amazon and the search engine directs you to the correctly spelled Reebok items. A search on Craigslist will turn up dozens of items spelled both ways.
Look at these listings for Brighton jewelry. 
None of these items will show up if the buyer puts Brighton into the search box. Some are spelled wrong and others have run other words together with the word Brighton without a space separating them. I even found one ad that didn’t mention the brand Brighton at all. You need to put the brand name in your listings.
When sellers list items with the name spelled wrong they risk the item they are listing not being found by buyers. Although there are general categories for items, most people will choose to do a search for exactly what they want. Many times a seller will relist a misspelled item over and over again with the price getting cheaper each time. Had they spelled the name of the product correctly the item may have sold.
You can make money from the spelling mistakes that other sellers make. Many sellers spend time looking for these types of mistakes, buy the item at a low cost, then after they receive the item they list them with the proper names or wording. A $50 pair of jeans can turn into a $150 sale if worded correctly. You probably have heard of this referred to as arbitrage.
Sellers who know that their buyers may not know the correct spelling of an item should put both the incorrect and the correct spelling in their listing title. This insures that your item will be found whether the buyer spells it correctly or not. One example of this is Z-Coil shoes. The manufacturer spells it Z-Coil but I have seen listings for zcoil and z coil. In this instance it would be better for the seller to list all three ways the buyer may type the name in the search box.
Another way to ruin your chances of being found is to run your words together or use punctuation without a space between it and your search word or brand name. Again, the Z-Coil reference, a listing whose title reads ZCOIL/Z-COIL will not be found when a buyer types in either one of those two words. The search engine sees it as one big word so it won’t match the search term.
Use spell check when you are listing. Most listing forms will highlight misspelled words so double checking your work is easier. Look for items that are misspelled and consider purchasing them and making a profit by selling them for more with a correct listing title.
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Tags: brand name, listing titles, spelling counts
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