One of my favorite ways to save money throughout the year is saving all my coins. I have a large decorative glass vase that works well for this. As the end of the year approaches, it’s time to cash in my coins. I use the collected money for Christmas presents.
Image by ThrasherDave via Flickr
By going to a Coinstar machine, I can exchange my coins for gift cards with no coin counting fee! Here are some of the gift cards you can choose from:
- Starbucks
- Amazon
- ITunes
- Circuit City
- JC Penney
- Eddie Bauer
- Borders
- Pier 1 Imports
- Cabela’s
- Disney store
- AMC Theaters
- Old Navy
- Linens n Things
You can find a Coinstar machine in many grocery stores, or go to www.coinstar.com to find one near you.
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It’s not widely known but a significant proportion of eBay sellers regularly fail to check their auction listings before they submit them to eBay. Sometimes these spelling mistakes are deliberate and arise because the sellers are trying to squeeze too much detail in to the auction title (eBay limits this to just 65 letters). More usually these typos are due to carelessness or a basic inability to spell.
But why does this matter ?
Because unless someone searching on eBay for a particular item happens to misspell their search word in exactly the same way then these misspelled auction items are unlikely to be found.
Up until relatively recently the only way that these misspelled auctions could be found was by looking through the auction listings one at a time.
Thankfully there is another way to find these misspelled auctions: one that has been used successfully by tens of thousands of users over the twelve months and it’s to use a third party web site to search for eBay misspellings called Auction-Fatfingers.com.
This specialized search engine functions by taking a correctly spelled word or brandname, deliberately misspelling it in a variety of ways and then submitting the list of misspellings to eBay. Any misspelled auctions containing any of the words on the list will then be shown on eBay.
But why do this ?
The answer is stunningly simple ! Because these misspelled auctions are normally so difficult to find they attract less bids. This means that misspelled items generally sell for less than the same item which is spelled correctly, if they sell at all. So while these stupid typos cost the sellers money they mean that you, the purchaser, can get a real bargain.
If you’re really smart you can even relist the misspelled items that you buy (taking care to avoid introducing misspellings) in order to make a profit.
So what are you waiting for ? Why not head over to Auction-Fatfingers.com immediately and try searching for ‘Abercrombie’, ‘Motorola’ or ‘Playstation’. You’ll be amazed at the bargains that you can pick up.
Tags: bargains, ebay, fatfingers, misspellings, typos