[mattgibson]

A friend used to have a great ebay sideline in reselling poorly listed items at a higher price.

He'd search for reasonably high value items that had been listed with spelling mistakes in the name so that they didn't show up in searches, or showed up too far down the results to be noticed. He'd then buy them and immediately on winning the auction, re-list the same item but without the spelling mistakes.

His secret trick was using a copy/paste of the text and images from the historically highest priced listing that had sold for that same item, which ebay made it easy to search for. By the time it arrived in the post, he'd already sold it on at a higher price to someone else. He just relabelled the packages, sent them on and pocketed the difference.

[chupaolo]

That's a great trick! Any idea how profitable this was?

[mattgibson]

I never asked for figures, but he kept doing it despite being in a reasonably well paid job as social media manager for a restaurant chain.

Which brings to mind another of his tricks: He set up a lunch voucher trading scheme for all of the other restaurants in the little downtown area where he was based. He got to eat anywhere he liked every lunch time.

One of his employment perks was getting a free lunch from his restaurant every day. He soon got bored of it, so he designed and printed some home made lunch vouchers with his name on, and arranged for the front of house staff to accept them in lieu of payment. The understanding was that there would be no more than one per day for the days he didn't eat there. Then he went to all of the other restaurants and told their front of house staff that they could swap their own free lunches for his by letting him eat there in exchange for his vouchers. They could then eat at his restaurant for free on one of the next few days.

That was 10 years ago and I've never since met anyone with a better hustle than that guy.