With more than 167 million registered users eBay is the largest market-place in the world. Tens of thousands of items are listed every day and the vast majority of these don't contain any spelling mistakes. But a significant proportion do, either in the item title or the description.

Now I'm sure you're thinking 'so what, why does this matter?' Well the answer is surprisingly simple - these misspelled auction items cannot be found directly using eBay's built-in search functions. To find them, you'll need to browse the category listings by hand, which is tedious and extremely time-consuming. As a result misspelled auctions get fewer bids and usually sell for less (if they sell at all).

If you're looking to pick up a bargain on eBay this is great news but if you want an easy way to make some extra money why not buy these misspelled items cheaply and then sell them on again at a profit. Talk about easy money ! But how do you find them?

If you're going to use eBay's built-in search system to find them you'll need to manually generate a list of all of the possible misspellings for your particular search term. Whilst this will work, it's pretty hit or miss, not to mention tedious because there are four main categories of misspelling.

First of all there are the obvious ways: missing out letters, typing the same letter twice and getting two letters the wrong way round. But then there are the less obvious mistakes like hitting a key adjacent to the one that you want. Sounds pretty simple doesn't it ? As an example, let's look at the word 'computer'. Using the above ways of mis-spelling the word results in a list of 64 possible misspellings:

omputer, cmputer, coputer, comuter, compter, compuer, computr, compute, ccomputer, coomputer, commputer, compputer, compuuter, computter, computeer, computerr, fomputer, vomputer, omputer, xomputer, domputer, c0mputer, cpmputer, clkmputer, cimputer, c9mputer, cokputer, conputer, cojputer, com-uter, comuter, comluter, comouter, com0uter, comp8ter, compiter, compjter, comphter, compyter, comp7ter, compu6er, compuyer, compuger, compufer, compurer, compu5er, comput4r, computrr, computdr, computwr, comput3r, compute5, computet, computef, computed, computee, compute4, ocmputer, cmoputer, copmuter, comupter, comptuer, compuetr, computre

Now if you're thinking there's no way that someone could misspelling such a simple word as 'computer', here's a fact. At the time of writing, searching on eBay.com using the above list of words results in 46 results, many of which had no bids at all because they were hidden to 'normal searchers'.

Whilst it is possible to generate the complete list of misspellings by hand it's pretty tedious, particularly as the list grows longer as the length of your search word increases. Thankfully, though, there's a much better way.

Several websites exist that will automatically generate the list of misspelled words for you, all you need to do is to supply the original search phrase and usually choose an eBay site to search. However, most will search the whole of the eBay site and this can be a problem as you'll get lots of matches from unrelated categories so my tip is to use a site such as Missing-Auctions.com which allows you to restrict your search to a particular eBay category.

So there you have it. Whether you're just trying to pick up a bargain on eBay or you're looking for cheap items to sell on again at a profit, searching for misspelled auction items on one of the leading third-party eBay search sites is the first thing that you should do. You'll almost certainly save money !