Today’s lesson for eBay sellers: if you’re selling something rare and collectible, make sure you check the spelling on your listing. One seller recently sold a bottle of beer for $304. A pretty respectable sum, you might think, until you discover that your winning bidder went on to sell the same item for $503,300.
The item in question was a bottle of Allsopp’s Beer, brewed specially for Sir Edward Belcher’s 1852 expedition to the Arctic. The original listing misspelled the name of the company, with only one “p”: it also didn’t contain any of the extra information about the provenance of the beer bottle, which the later re-auction added.
I can’t help but feel sorry for the first seller: how gutted would you be to let half a million dollars slip through your fingers like that? It definitely pays to research before you sell – though perhaps not as well as it pays to search for misspellings on eBay!
3 Responses
Reading the Antiques Trade Gazette the other day, they are of the opinion that the first did actually receive the price for this item that was about its market value, even with the provenance.
They also suspect that this is a “celebrity” auction and will never actually get paid for.
Celebrity auctions are those that gather a lot of attention for Ebay, due to incredibly high prices, then fade into folklore without a payment ever being made…
I wonder if this guy was paid?
Mark
If that’s a true evaluation Mark, just think how gutted the buyer will now feel if they’ve paid $1/2m too much for the bottle 😀
last i checked, it looked like the sale fizzled.