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Conrad24: this post made my day. I have dreamed of a script that would scour eBay and amazon finding products available via "buy now" that we're being resold o

Conrad24: this post made my day. I have dreamed of a script that would scour eBay and amazon finding products available via "buy now" that we're being resold on amazon for some configurable profit. Or vice versa. I figure with some initial investment and monitored training, it could get good enough to just cut me a check every month. Since high frequency trading has destabilized the stock market, this could be a better high risk investment.

vidarh 14y ago
My ex has a standing rule whenever buying stuff of e-bay to always check misspellings, and there's regularly items going very cheaply with misspelled items. I'm sure there's an opportunity there, but hard to gauge how big. Especially with relatively small ticket items that people just want to get rid off. E.g. toys - there's a thriving market in Lego minifigures. In fact, sometimes the minifigures can individually fetch more than the set, because for many of the ranges, all the sets will contain different subsets of recognizable characters, so there's often a market consisting of people that have e.g. 3 of the 4 ninja turtles and want the last one without paying for a full set. So the prices are already ridiculously high for some items. But many of the people in that market are totally unsophisticated. For example parents selling of their kids collections once they've "grown out of it", and when they misspell something, items can go for 1/4 of their market value or even less... If you're willing to hold on to them and monitor prices for a while, you can do even better, as many of the ranges appreciate substantially in value (big collectors market...).
- rmc 14y ago
  I'd have thought that eBay would have improved their search algorithm to take into account misspellings like that by now...
  - grimman 14y ago
    They have no reason to. The initial (mis-spelled) sale will net them their expected revenue, and by allowing people to flip goods at a profit they are now also sharing a piece of the (regurgitated?) cake. Same item, double the income... and at what price? Developer hours? Not at all!
chunknug 14y ago
The founder of Milo did this very thing. He queried the eBay API, aggregated items for arbitrage, then had them sent (delayed, I suppose) to the winner of the optimized auction he had set up after the buy. Made a good deal of money until he was found out and stripped of API access (arbitrage is not allowed). Not sure if there was an Amazon angle.

vidarh 14y ago

My ex has a standing rule whenever buying stuff of e-bay to always check misspellings, and there's regularly items going very cheaply with misspelled items. I'm sure there's an opportunity there, but hard to gauge how big. Especially with relatively small ticket items that people just want to get rid off. E.g. toys - there's a thriving market in Lego minifigures. In fact, sometimes the minifigures can individually fetch more than the set, because for many of the ranges, all the sets will contain different subsets of recognizable characters, so there's often a market consisting of people that have e.g. 3 of the 4 ninja turtles and want the last one without paying for a full set. So the prices are already ridiculously high for some items. But many of the people in that market are totally unsophisticated. For example parents selling of their kids collections once they've "grown out of it", and when they misspell something, items can go for 1/4 of their market value or even less... If you're willing to hold on to them and monitor prices for a while, you can do even better, as many of the ranges appreciate substantially in value (big collectors market...).

rmc 14y ago
I'd have thought that eBay would have improved their search algorithm to take into account misspellings like that by now...
- grimman 14y ago
  They have no reason to. The initial (mis-spelled) sale will net them their expected revenue, and by allowing people to flip goods at a profit they are now also sharing a piece of the (regurgitated?) cake. Same item, double the income... and at what price? Developer hours? Not at all!

chunknug 14y ago

The founder of Milo did this very thing. He queried the eBay API, aggregated items for arbitrage, then had them sent (delayed, I suppose) to the winner of the optimized auction he had set up after the buy. Made a good deal of money until he was found out and stripped of API access (arbitrage is not allowed). Not sure if there was an Amazon angle.