Shopping on eBay is supposed to be about finding good deals. Some people have much better luck at it than others. A few summers ago, a beer memorabilia collector from Oklahoma ended up making the ultimate investment.

“Collectordan” won a bottle of Allsopp’s Arctic Ale on eBay in which the seller made a typo in his auction and spelled it “Allsop’s.” The auction ended with very little interest and only 2 bids for the bottle that was obviously worth so much more than the winning bid of $304.00.

When an auction has a typo, it can be impossible for bidders to find it with the search tool. Since the majority of eBayers only use search, it made the auction a complete failure.

To makes matters worse for the original seller, the winner turned around and listed the bottle again, but this time with the name of the beer spelt correctly, and got 157 bidders and a final sale price of $503,300.00!

It’s hard to say just how “collectordan” came across the auction. Most likely he used a typo tool like other savvy collectors such as TypoHound or Typozay. These tools will search eBay for typos automatically.

This story definitely shows the importance of good spelling!