Are you someone with a collection you would like to sell? Have you accumulated a lot of tools, clothes, or other things you no longer need? Has your job just gone away or your hours been cut. Have you just realized people will pay good money for that "stuff" if you can just get it published on Ebay?
Have you just checked into what is required to sell on Ebay and been horrified at the complexity, requirements, rules, and effort required? Then you are probably wondering if there is an auction management system that would help you with all that. When you look around you will see there are lots of vendors who will be happy to sell you their system. It will only cost you $x.xx per month and perhaps a percentage of each sale. Sounds great, but unless you really use it actively, the monthly costs go on and on whether you sell anything of not.
Unique items present an unavoidable problem for all these systems. You have to write an item description, take photos, set a price and calculate shipping costs for each item individually. If you are selling widgets you do that stuff once and then re-use it every time. You can't do that with unique items and that blows away many of the benefits of a computer sales system.
We are looking around for software that would facilitate the sale of unique items by making it easier to write, edit, and use the necessary unique information. There are macro expanders that might reduce complex task to a single keystroke. There are various tools to expand the functions of the clipboard that might work.
We will write about what we find and how we use them as we move forward with this project.
I've talked about getting serious about selling on Ebay for at least four years. I've even sold a few things there. I always get the feeling I am stepping onto a treadmill. You don't make money unless you keep selling. I've gotten really spoiled by some of my websites that generate ongoing income from organic traffic without any additional work by me. The need to constantly list, pack, and ship physical products is painful.
I have come to realize an unavoidable problem with selling one of a kind items is the need to take pictures and write an item description for each item. That takes a lot of time. Automated systems work really well if you want to sell thousands each of ten or twenty widgets. Not nearly so well for unique items.
A partial solution to that problem is to concentrate on more expensive items. It doesn't take any more effort to list a $100 item than a $5 item, but it takes much less work to make the same amount of money.
However, I still have a lot of "Cheap Stuff" that I need to get rid of. So, I keep my eyes open for an auction management system that would make the Ebay sales process as easy and efficient as possible. AuctionSound.com is the latest one I heard about.
AuctionSound would like to be much more than just your Ebay auction manager. It comes with an email marketing setup and has extensive features for tracking consignment sales. Done right, I think it could become the core system for a distributed business. Consignors can check in to see where their items are in the sales process. Employees can access restricted functions so they can do their work without exposing the rest of the system. All of this is done via an online application so the participants can be geographically distributed.
This system would also work well for an extended family. I can imagine a situation where Mom & Dad have a lot of stuff they would like to sell but lack the skill/energy to do all the work themselves. With AuctionSound it should be possible for Mom & Dad to act as consignors and drop shippers. Someone else in the family can take care of running the actual auctions. When things sell Mom & Dad pack them up and get them mailed. I think variations of this plan would work for a lot of families. Everyone does what they can/will do best and the family benefits.
Maybe this time I'll be motivated enough to give the software a real test.
