Service Review: Auctiva for Your eBay Listings

As you can probably tell from my previous content, I am an eBay seller. It's amazing to look back and see quickly we have grown from 200-300 auctions a month to 2000, as we did last month and we continue to grow. This volume would not be possible, with sanity intact, without a terrific auction management tool. Auctiva is just that tool.

My absolute favorite thing about Auctiva is the fact that it is free to use! Auctiva actually makes their money off the insurance they offer, so using the rest of the features is free. Similar tools from other services would cost me a few hundred dollars a month. There are at-a-fee features such as insurance and domain hosting, but the basic tools are free and terrific.

Creating a listing in Auctiva is simple to do. The one-page listing creator is so much more efficient that creating the listing directly with eBay. They offer a variety of free templates, so you can create a professional looking, customized listing that sets you apart from other sellers. You can post your listing immediately, or schedule them for a later date. The listing templates and scheduled start times are extra fees at eBay.

Image hosting is free, with unlimited storage! You can upload as many as 100 images at a time, and include up to 24 images per listing at no extra charge. Your listings will allow your buyers to view "super-size" images that really show off your product. At eBay, image hosting over a certain amount, multiple images, and super-size images are all extra fees.

As a volume seller, I can't tell you how much time it saves by using the profile features in Auctiva. You can create multiple listing detail profiles for shipping, eBay upgrades (gallery, featured, etc), payment, and so forth. For each listing you create, you simply choose which profile you want to use for each category and all of the details will be populated automatically. You can also create master profiles that are made up of the listing detail profiles, so when you sell an item, you just select one of the master profiles and all of the specifics are populated automatically.

If you sell items on a consignment basis, Auctiva can take care of this as well. You can create profile for each consignee along with their information and consignment agreement. Auctiva will track listings by consignee and how much you have earned from their sale-depending on what you indicate as the agreement.

Auctiva insurance is another powerful tool. The rates are significantly less than that offered by the post office, and the coverage is much broader. It applies to international shipments and the $500 maximum you can purchase online through the Post Office does not apply. I haven't had the misfortune of a claim with Auctiva insurance, so I can't say how they are handled. However, it can't be much worse than a Post Office insurance claim.

Auctiva offers a host of automated features: emails, payment reminders, automated feedback, and so forth that make managing a growing eBay business much easier. Everything is easily customizable with both html and preview editing modes. I love the feature to automatically reject "Best Offers" based on my preferences, but I'd also like to be able to automatically accept "Best Offers".

You are also given an Auctiva storefront, where they help promote your items for sale. You can purchase a domain name, or keep the default. With this, you have a blog which you can use to communicate en masse with your customers.

Auctiva also does a great job keeping up with the constantly changing eBay environment: fees, postal rate changes, new categories, and new rules. I haven't had a problem with Auctiva not having an update available that I need.

With all of these positives, there are a couple of things I would like to see. First, an inventory feature. This is a project that they have been working on for a while, but it is not yet ready. I sell a lot of identical items, so I want to see it work just as eBay's inventory feature. I want to be able to enter a quantity of items on hand, an average cost of goods for those items, and create automated setting to sell those items in a store format, auction, multiple item listings, and have Auctiva track how much I have on hand and my profit margin. I'd also like it to send second chance offers automatically based on criteria that I define.

I would like to see an integrated shipping tool that allows me to print bulk packing slips and labels-just like Pay Pal multi-order shipping, for those familiar with this.

I would also like an off-line listing creator, like eBay's Turbo Lister-only with the same free features Auctiva offers. There are times I have my laptop but no internet access in which I'd like to create some listing to be uploaded later.

Essentially, I'd like Auctiva to become an end-all auction management tool. I don't want to need three different services (eBay, PayPal and Auctiva) to manage my listings.

In conclusion, Auctiva is just a terrific tool. It adds a lot of efficiency to my listing and saves me probably $1 for each of my listings by offering some of Ebay's little "extras" for free. At 2000 listings per month, the savings are huge! I believe that Auctiva will continue to evolve into that dream service I described in my last few paragraphs, but it'll take some time. If you sell on eBay, you need Auctiva!