I'm excited!

I just submitted my first ebay auction with a video in it. I am sure that to alot of people this is old news, but to many others (like me) it is something great to learn.

Here is the link to the listing. It is a new reproduction tin toy merry go round.

Tin Toy Merry Go Round

I was able to learn how to do this from a course of videos and information that I purchased from Thomas James Finer Templates on ebay. I would recommend his info to anyone selling on ebay or their own site.

If you would like more information, or the code that you use to insert this in your own auction, just contact me through an ebay message and I will help you out.

That's all for now.
Have a great day!

Just a short message about email and ebay messages.

I really want to cut down the time spent on emails and ebay messages. We did put in FAQ's that everyone sees before they ask a question, and I think that did help. We do try to make sure our descriptions are complete, but some people just don't read. I have been tracking how I spend my time, and have spent 9.5 hours in the last week on emails and ebay messages. That includes all emails, and not just ebay related. I know that time could be put to better use though.

If you are an ebay stores subscriber and haven't done so already, I would recommend filling out your frequently asked questions. You can get there by going to your My Summary page and clicking on the link to "Preferences", under the heading of "My Account." Scroll down to the category of "Selling Preferences" and to the right of "Ask seller a question", click on "show" and then click "edit." Then just enter your questions and answers and click on the Submit button.

That's it for now. Have a great day.

Well, it has been quite a while since I have posted an update here, so here it is. I have not really thought about AuctionReviser much because it usually works well without me worrying about it. There are still occasional times when it will miss some auctions, but those times are not very often. When it does happen, all of the auctions that were not revised will have ended around the same time.

I would recommend their service. Just remember that they are still in beta testing, which means the service is still free, but there may be an occasional problem. I do think that when it gets out of the beta phase it will be an excellent service that I would highly recommend.

Blackthorne is gone. Well, for me it is gone. It is very complicated and bloated software, but that is not why it is gone. Someone hijacked our ebay account, through the Blackthorne connection to ebay. In other words, the hijacker also has Blackthorne on their computer, and was able to access our ebay account through the token set by Blackthorne. I don't know if they obtained our ebay password, or if there is another way they could have done it, but when ebay trust and safety fixed everything for us one of the things that they suggested was to disable the Blackthorne access. We did that and decided that we didn't want it after all.

We did keep the Selling Manager Pro subscription, and I think it is great. We don't really use it for listing items, but it is great for automaticall relisting sold or unsold items. You can set up automation rules for any of you listed items. With AuctionReviser and Selling Manager Pro together we save alot of time that we use to spend revising and relisting.

Well, I have now been using AuctionReviser.com for a few week and I must say that they have improved drastically. There are still a few bugs here and there, but they have been trying very hard to work them out and keep on top of things. I really appreciate the personalized service and communication that I have received with any problems or suggestions.

Also, in response to my earlier posts, I have received answers to many of the initial problems that I experienced, and things that didn't seem quite right. They have removed all beta users credit card numbers, so I won't be charged anything unless I give them that info again and choose to continue the service.  As to the situation that I had when I signed up and the interaction with Jim Kaiser I did receive an answer for that. The following is a message from Narinder Gaheer that he emailed to me, and I would like to add that was respectful of my position on the matter.

I also wanted to clarify the situation with Jim Kaiser. Yes we
were originally hired to build an auction extender tool which we were
asked to build using screen scraping and not eBay API. The project ran
into troubles when ebay changed their stuff around causing Jim to pull
out of the project and never launch it. We went back to him and offered
to build an ebay api version of it which Jim declined saying he has
hired other programmers to do the job. We then rebuilt the tool
(without using any of the source code or copyright from Jim's product)
on our own. AuctionReviser is in no way a renaming of the project that
we did for Jim Kaiser and has taken us over 6 months to code from
scratch. So I just wanted to clarify my position on that.

So, overall it is going well with AuctionReviser. I can now recommend it, with a condition. Until they get all of the bugs worked out, I would suggest setting up you rules so that your auctions do not go past about 14 or 14.5 hours. That way if there is any problem they will have time to respond to the problem before your auction goes below 12 hours, or you will have some time to catch it yourself and manually revise it before 12 hours.

It is very nice to not have to worry about which auctions are ending when, if they can be extended or not, and if they have any bids or not. It does save time, and for me, I think it is a valuable service. Especially since it is still free, but even at their regular subscription prices it will be a great value and I will still be using them after they start charging for the service.

As an update to my previously mentioned trial of mpire.com's mpire builder. They have a good service and a nice interface, but after their 30 day trial I have decided not to continue my subscription. There is nothing really wrong with the service and I didn't have a bad experience, I just decided it was not the service that was going to meet my needs.

I have decided to try ebay's Blackthorn Pro, that also comes with Selling Manager Pro. I would like to open an ebay ProStore, and think it would be great if I could get an auction management program that would interface with the store and allow checkout redirect through my off of ebay store. Blackthorne seems to be a very robust and complicated software application, and because of my time limitations it will probably take most of the 30 day trial to get familiar with the program. I do hope it works out, because I think it would be beneficial to have one of ebay's own tools. My first attempt to post an auction produced an error, so it's not off to a great start. I do really prefer an online solution, instead of an offline solution like Blackthorne, but since it comes with Selling Manager Pro I get both. Maybe it will work out great and I will get the best of both world, an online and offline auction management solution. I will see how it goes and keep you updated.

That's all for now, have a great day on ebay!