How about a cool half a million from a single sale? Oh well, this looks like it was a hoax but the guy will sure get his a few grands out of this deal. In the interview here he already boasts about six figure offers he received for the bottle.
Finding misspelled auctions and profiting from them is what TypoTrawler, a new website launched last week, all about. However unlike these other typo hunting services that require you to know what you want, TypoTrawler is much less restrictive in the way that you just need to select a set of categories to match your appetite and TypoTrawler will take care of the rest.
No, it won’t find you a half-a-million bottle of ale, at least not right away, but it will certainly make your life easier. All you will have to do is stare at the thousands of auctions scrolling in a constant stream and try not to fall asleep.
Alright, jokes aside, I think I like this new ajaxified web2-ish creation from the team who also brought us TypoTracker. All auctions I see on the screen do have typos (which potentially can result in a bargain) and are presented in a chronological manner (those ending sooner come first) which is very logical.
Social features? You’ve got it!
Vote auctions up to improve the chances of the items show up on other users screens. Although I don’t see why I would want anyone else to know about a gem I just discovered. It is really in my interest to keep things low profile. In fact, many would probably be tempted to use the down button to bury things they find. For that same reason I would suggest showing the number of bids next to each auction to suggest the amount of activity the auction has attracted. Popular auctions with many bids will likely be of no use.
Business plan? Quite simple.
Each of the links you click has an affiliate code and the website creators are getting a share from your sale. The team is actually very straightforward about it when they talk about it on the FAQ page.
The idea of TypoTrawler, like many websites, is to make money. Every time you click on an item, a little cookie is stored on your computer saying that it was us that linked you to eBay. If you proceed to buy the item, we get a small commision from eBay.
Hey, I just spotted a typo in this statement! Now I am almost sure that the people behind this had issues with their spelling in high school which in turn helped them to come up with the idea for TypoTrawler. ;-)
What do you think about TypoTrawler? A useful tool or a time waster? Leave your aye’s and nay’s in the comments.
Thanks for the review!
We will look into some of the suggestions you made… We especially like the idea of filtering items based on how many bids there are. We’ve already got a little control panel on the drawing board so that users can filter items by price and number of bids.
The typo has also been fixed!
Thanks again,
Jack