We’re happy to say that Auctomatic has joined a bigger family. From today, we will become a part of Live Current Media, the owner of ecommerce sites like Perfume.com.
Why?
Partnering with Live Current Media will help us build out our vision of what a trading site should look like. We’ve been in ecommerce for a long time, and our belief is that to improve on what’s out there right now, you really have to first focus on improving the seller experience.But that’s not enough, as ultimately we all know that sellers need a lot of buyers. Our plan was to eventually launch a mechanism for our sellers to directly sell to their customers, be it through eBay, their own stores, Google and eventually other trading sites. Working with Live Current lets us realise this plan much earlier than we could have hoped for.
We think that combining the technology we’ve built to improve the seller experience with the exciting buyer destinations owned by Live Current, we can make big improvements to how e-commerce currently works. The e-commerce landscape is changing quickly and we’ll make sure that auctomatic is an important part of that.
But what about me?
Nothing will change on the site for now. In the future, we expect the product to improve, but we’ll communicate regularly about any changes we may make. As always, we welcome your feedback and thoughts!
We’ve long supported importing auction templates from a file that had URLs pointing to images in it. But if you weren’t importing and wanted to pull auction photos from the web into Auctomatic, you had to save the image by hand, then upload it.
Now that’s automated:
You just give us URLs to photos anywhere on the web, click import, and we pull them into your account.
This isn’t a huge earth shattering feature, or a desperate must have for a high volume seller. What it is, I think, is one of those little details that make life just a bit easier. We’re always on the lookout for places where we can streamline a bit, because we believe that they add up to make an application that’s smooth and friendly.
We’ve had a lot of people compliment Auctomatic’s easy-to-use form for creating auctions.
It’s much shorter than the eBay process, with free picture hosting, a WYSIWYG editor for creating your item description, an AJAX-based category browser, and integrated support for most of eBay’s international sites.
Because of this, we’re delighted to roll out Auctomatic QuickList, which lets people without an Auctomatic account use our auction creation tools for free.
One thing we’ve noticed is that sellers very frequently want to list an item more than once—perhaps to different international sites, or because it doesn’t fetch a good price the first time it’s listed for sale, etc.
With QuickList, we wanted to make it easy for people to list items again, without having to attach an account to the item. After some discussion, we decided to give users the option of creating a private URL at the end of the listing process. This URL can be used at any stage in the future to retrieve your listing, which can then be modified and listed again.
We’ve also received great feedback about Auctomatic’s built-in analytics for eBay auctions (thanks Phil!)—we automatically track every search keyword that’s used to access your auction, along with referring URLs, and pageviews per day. In the near future, we’ll be integrating this with QuickList.
Context: it’s 2.30am on a Wednesday night. This email exchange just took place:
On Feb 7, 2008, at 2:12 AM, Vincent wrote:
Hi,I just found your site. It looks nice but I have a question: do you support ebay NL (Netherlands)?
Regards,
Vincent
On Feb 7, 2008, at 2:23 AM, Harjeet Taggar wrote:
Hi Vincent,
Thanks for your email. We did not support eBay Netherlands ten minutes ago, but we’ve worked on it since your email, and support is now available—please test it out, and let us know how you’re finding Auctomatic.We’re adding new features all the time, so please do feel free to drop me an email with any feedback you have.
To help you save time listing, Auctomatic remembers from the most previously-used listing your eBay account, the site you want to list to, the country, zip location, paypal address and payment methods.
If you want to change it, typing will immediately erase it, of course—but analysis suggests that the most recently used value will be used again more than 50% of the time.
When you go to sell something new, you’ve often have already worked with something similar—you haven’t sold a Pirates of the Caribbean DVD before, but you did list Wedding Crashers a few weeks ago. A few users have requested an easy way of duplicating an existing item (either an inventory item or an auction template), and so we’ve just rolled it out. Enjoy!
We’re back in full swing after the holidays, and cranking new features out at an alarming rate. We just deployed two that we’ve been working on for a while now: richer statistics, and custom inventory details.First, since the first auctions listed on Auctomatic, we’ve kept track of lots of stats about an auction. But, we haven’t exposed all of it in the application. We just released a richer tracking interface. Now, if you click on the stats column of an auction, you see a page like this:You can look at referrers of views to your auction, and the top eBay search keywords that brought viewers in. Second, thanks to Brian’s tireless efforts, custom details for inventory items is now finished. You can save as much of any information you like with your inventory items. It looks like this:Importing into custom fields, and automatically pulling them into your templates are both on the way. We’re pretty excited that soon it will be possible to take a file full of inventory data, make one auction template, and use it to automatically build customized listings.
Ever since Auctomatic launched, we’ve displayed the number of bids for each auction on the auctions page. Lots of people told us that they wanted to track the number of people watching an auction, too. We now support that! If you go to Manage -> Auctions, you’ll see a new addition to the bids column:
So the other method requested for getting your many pictures into Auctomatic was to be able to upload them in one go in a zip file. This has now been done (thanks Phil!). Simply select the zip file you wish to upload in the pictures section, and they should all appear ready to insert into your listings in no time at all. Right now the file limit is currently 3MB, but we’re looking to increase this soon.
You can look at referrers of views to your auction, and the top eBay search keywords that brought viewers in. Second, thanks to Brian’s tireless efforts, custom details for inventory items is now finished. You can save as much of any information you like with your inventory items. It looks like this:
Importing into custom fields, and automatically pulling them into your templates are both on the way. We’re pretty excited that soon it will be possible to take a file full of inventory data, make one auction template, and use it to automatically build customized listings.