Ain’t Bad Grammar Wrong? Can It Help When Selling on eBay?

Excerpt from "The 7 Essential Steps to Successful eBay Marketing."

As we mentioned earlier, spelling and grammatical errors are typical no-nos. There are, however, times when a certain unpolished, ill-mannered, regressive approach can work to your advantage. For example, behold the little gem of a trucker hat shown in Figure 4-2.

Figure 2: White trash hat
The description here makes our case for unsophisticated speech that works:“In the common corner ya got the hat that everyone wears, from fancy pants in Ho'wood to ditch diggers in Des Moines...Von Dutch! In the trailer park corner ya got a killer hat at a frickin' reasonable price...WHITE HOT TRASH! Let's git ready to bid or sumthin'.”

The writer captured a bit of that trashy flavor, matching the tone and style of the copy with the product itself. This kind of stuff can be fun, but be careful if you use it. If the audience doesn’t get it, you can fall flat on your face and waste a listing.

On the other hand, if you come up with an approach that lots of people find humorous, clever, or outrageous, the listing can become “viral” and get emailed around the Internet. We discuss this more in Chapter 5.

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