Shirk

This article offers a few simple techniques that let you benefit from sellers who either dont know or dont care how their products are listed on eBay and consequently their mistakes and omissions often lead to items going unsold or selling way below their real market value. The upshot is: you look for items poorly or wrongly listed, buy them cheap, correct mistakes and improve their earlier listing, then resell at a profit on eBay.

The best way to make steady money is to literally stalk eBay looking for items available for you to buy at less than their normal selling price on eBay. This discrepancy can be due to several reasons, for example:

- The item is poorly listed and failing to attract interest because it is listed in a category where few potential buyers will find it;

- the seller offers an item Buy It Now or accepts a Best Offer at much below the price the item regularly fetches on eBays highest bidder auctions;

- the listing has spelling mistakes or typos which render it oblivious to eBays search engines when potential buyers seek for similar items;

- the pictures are poor and that deters people from bidding;

- the item is highly desirable but the seller doesnt know this or fails to describe it properly.

These and other anomalies present a product you might buy cheap and relist almost right away to at least double your investment and maybe earn a great deal more. Many people see this as a regular feature of their eBay ventures.

Tips

* Look especially for items failing to attract bids which are poorly described, listed in the wrong category, having typing mistakes or typos, have poor illustrations, or which are missing essential words and fail to respond to eBay search engines. In all cases the item can usually be purchased below typical eBay value and relisted immediately after corrections and improvements are made.

* Look for items with no bids and close to auction end, you might find many are poorly described or another reason deters bidding on an otherwise valuable item. You might also find sellers of Buy It Now items remaining unsold just a few hours before auction end will accept Best Offer bids way lower than would be so when the auction began. Check manually or find last minute no bid auction and Buy It Now listings using www.no-bids.com or click on the All Items Ending Now icon normally middle of screen on the home page on any eBay country site home page.

* Do price comparisons on eBay. Youll often find items available Buy It Now or Best Offer which regularly fetch far more on auction listings. This is because people get caught up in the thrill of bidding and chase items they dont really need or want just to prevent someone else winning them.

Apart from spelling and typing errors for which seek-and-find software is available, its a question of physically looking for items to resell. With so many items listed on eBay, in several country sites and in hundreds of different categories and sub-categories, you really do need to focus on one or a handful of product types or youll just get horribly confused. You also need a good system to keep count of items viewed, low price Best Offer opportunities, and so on. A spreadsheet will usually do or try one of the diary and note-taking programs available for most computers.

Avril Harper is a UK based writer and PowerSeller. Learn more about eBay arbitrage at http://www.publishingcircles.com/arbitrage.htm or download a free guide 103 PowerSeller Tips at http://www.toppco.com.

One of my hobbies is wine tasting. So its no surprise that an article from the Wall Street Journal recently grabbed my attention. It said: U.S. Investigates Counterfeiting of Rare Wines.

The very idea assaults the senses.

According to the article, the targets of the counterfeiters include Frances great Chateau Mouton Rothschild. How distasteful!

Chateau Mouton, of course, enjoys an exalted and well earned reputation as one of the great Bordeaux wines of France. In The World Atlas of Wine, the historian, Hugh Johnson, describes the wines of the region this way:

. . . a combination of fresh soft-fruit, oak, dryness, subtlety combined with substance, a touch of cigar-box, a suggestion of sweetness and, above all, vigor.

Chateau Mouton elevates these characteristics to Olympian heights. Mr. Johnson sings its praise. Close your eyes and imagine. According to Johnson the wine is:

. . . strong, dark, full of the savour of ripe black currants. Given the ten or often even 20 years they need to mature, these wines reach into realms of perfection where they are rarely followed. But millionaires tend to be impatient: too much is drunk far too young.

Can you taste it?

Chateau Mouton also feeds the eyes with its artistic labels. Since 1945 the beauty of the wine has been enhanced with the designs of famous artists of the day, Picasso, Warhol, Miro, Kadinsky, to name only a few.

I received my first bottle of Mouton from my father when I graduated from college, a 1970 with a Chagall label, a simple line drawing enhanced with pink, yellow and blue. It was quite a change from our usual house wine today: Two Buck Chuck from Trader Joes.

I think about that bottle of Mouton when I read about counterfeit wine. Imagine the anticipation upon opening the bottle, the expectation of cherries, raspberries, black currants, only to discover . . . what? The smell of dirty gym socks, perhaps, or moldy cheese? Who knows.

And who knows where its from.

That thought leads me back to my role as a trademark lawyer. Dealing with trademarks may sound rather genteel, well removed from jail cells and guns. But not always so.

As trademark lawyers, we learn that counterfeiting involves more than wine or fifty dollar bills. Sometimes it involves Pine-Sol, at least my first counterfeiting case did. In the late 80s, customer complaints caused our client to discover that phony Pine-Sol was on sale in Chicago. The chase was on.

A counterfeiting case proceeds without notice to the sellers. Armed with a court order and accompanied by U.S. Marshals and our private investigators, we invaded a series of small south-side Chicago stores like Elliot Ness after Al Capone.

I can picture the uncooperative store owner made compliant when the Marshall took him aside to introduce his friends Smith and Wesson.

I can hear the violent barking of the mangy mutts left behind to guard the abandon dentists office on South Ashland Avenue where the counterfeits were filled.

I can see the barrels of chemicals, iridescent yellow beneath the glow of a bare bulb pulling electricity from a cord extended to an outside outlet behind a neighboring building.

I can smell the sharp pungent odor of the pine tar used to turn these caustic chemicals into ersatz Pine-Sol.

Mostly I can feel the anger rising in me when I learn from the lab report that kids accidentally drinking the counterfeit Pine-Sol could die or go blind. And I can feel the relief when the counterfeiter, Mr. Banda, was arrested and jailed after selling more of the stuff to stores in Detroit.

I think about all this when I contemplate the counterfeit Mouton, brewed perhaps in a back alley in France, a place where the light from a street lamp glistens on wet cobble stones, small bistros fill the air with the smells of butter, onion and garlic, and a small man smoking a Gaulois cigarette funnels Two Buck Chuck into bottles bearing copies of labels drawn by Salvadore Dali.

Chateau Mouton 1958.

And I wonder: will Hugh Johnsons impatient millionaires taste the difference?

Author, speaker and attorney Mark V.B. Partridge is an internationally recognized expert in intellectual property with over 25 years of experience helping major corporations, entrepreneurs and creative individuals protect their IP rights. As a professional speaker, he offers seminars, workshops and keynotes to help business leaders use IP to turn intellectual capital into incredible value. His book, "Guiding Rights: Trademarks, Copyright and the Internet" is available at Amazon.com and other online bookstores. For more information, visit http://www.GuidingRights.com

Toyota Motor Corp. confirmed that its chairman Fujio Cho met with Ford Motor Co. President and CEO Alan Mulally in Tokyo. However, Toyota denies the report written in Japanese newspaper that it was starting negotiations with the ailing automaker.

Toyota spokesperson Yasue Kato said Cho and Mulally met and exchanged greetings, but she refused to give further details including when and where the talks took place. Kato added that Toyota regularly holds meetings with other automakers when the opportunity presents itself. On one hand, Tom Hoyt, Ford's spokesperson said, "We meet regularly with other automakers on a variety of topics of mutual interest. We dont discuss the content of these meetings.

According to Kyodo News agency the meeting of the mentioned auto giants was held at Fords request. The source of the news was an unidentified Toyota official. Kyodo and the Nihon Keizai news also reported that the talks appear to have focused on how the two companies can strengthen cooperation in environmental technology.

Toyota is obviously performing well in the automotive industry. For the last quarter of the year, Toyota earned $3.44 billion while Ford lost $5.8 billion. Toyota, Japan's No.1 automaker is deemed a leader in auto advancements. Toyota Camry OEM parts are incomparable. Toyota parts for Prius are also making a remarkable reputation. Prius topped the 2007 U.S. governments annual top-10 fuel economy list released in October. Other Toyota vehicles have already established quality and reliability.

Toyota has licensed several hybrid system patents to Ford in March 2004. However, Ford did not escape a bleak future that is about to doom its existence in the auto industry. Today, Ford is facing major restructuring efforts because of the tough business competition. The automaker has admitted that it lags behind auto giants offering the right formula for the choosy car aficionados. Most of these auto giants are putting emphasis on fuel efficiency. They have released fuel-efficient vehicles to satisfy the mounting demands for the same. Susan Cischke, Ford's vice president for environmental and safety engineering, previously stated that the automaker sees ecological technology as crucial. Hence, Ford is now endeavoring to incorporate ecological technology with the latest advancements and demands.

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Mark Clarkson is a 35 year old marketing consultant for a leading auto parts store. This native of Denver is also an offroad enthusiast. ###