Well that wedding ring search turned out to be a complete disaster for my buddy. He got caught, hook, line and sinker by the sales crew at the shop.
Worse thing is he really blew the budget and the wife to be saw the bill. She freaked. I think she freaked because she was not involved in the process more than the price. So they ended up getting out of the ring purchase once she went down to the store.
Because she works in a computer suppliers office she knows her way around Ebay and other online sites. Part of the reason why she freaked was the price difference between Ebay and instore prices. She wanted to get maximum value. Plus she has this Ebay trick that she showed me earlier which works. She looks for Ebay typos when she searches for items on Ebay. Its a pretty cool trick that saved her more than a few dollars on stuff that she purchased around Christmas time.
What she does is she might switch one or two letters in the items that she is searching for. So instead of something like a diamond ring she would search for dimond ring. Notice the small difference its just missing one letter. She call the system her Ebay Misspelling discount. She figures if everyone is going to mark thing up in shipping she may as well save a few bucks.
One thing with the system is that it does not really create a new listing or something. What you end up getting is less buyers. So for some less popular items you could end up with just a few potential buyers. People did not find the listing because of the Ebay typos. You can try out the system and see the difference in the number of bidders once the auction is over. Just make sure that its something you want because you’ll likely end up winning it with the misspelling listing.