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Auctionbytes-Update, Number 81 - October 20, 2002 - ISSN 1528-6703     Previous Story | Contents | Next Story


Review: Turbo Lister, eBay's New Bulk-Listing Tool
By Toby Aulman
AuctionBytes.com

October 20, 2002
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eBay recently released Turbo Lister, their latest free bulk-listing tool. It will replace Mister Lister, which is being phased out over the next few months. I've been a Mister Lister user for quite some time, and have been using Turbo Lister for the last month.

Features

Turbo Lister allows you to list items for auctions and your eBay Store, and while it has built-in support for eBay Picture Services, you can still easily use your own image host. That's where the comparisons to Mister Lister end.

Turbo Lister allows you to preview your listings right in the program, offline, before you upload them. You can create multiple user profiles, allowing multiple seller setups on the same computer with the same program.

You can also input your description in either HTML view, where you see the coding, or in WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) view, where you can use the toolbar to change fonts, text color and size, and alignment, and see how it will look as you write. You can switch back and forth as necessary. There are also a number of built-in templates you can use to enhance the look of your listings.

Your completed listings are saved individually, not in collections as with Mister Lister, and you can create your own folders for organizing these listings. Turbo Lister currently supports listings for eBay U.S., eBay UK, and eBay Germany.

Usability

As with any program, there are some things I like and some things I'd like changed. The multi-step "create new listing" process is a bit cumbersome. I prefer a single-page form to input all my information. While leaps and bounds better than the multi-step online Sell Your Item form, I still find it less efficient than I would like. I'll give you a tip later on how to get around this problem.

Many of the things that you tend to leave the same from one listing to the next, such as Payment Methods, Payment Instructions, Ship-To Locations, etc., give you the option of saving what you've input as the default for future listings saving a great deal of repetitive input.

Storing and organizing your completed listings is a breeze. You can create and delete folders as needed, drag and drop listings from one folder to another, and easily see what you have. I use a rather simple system. One folder for items that I haven't launched yet, one for items currently listed, one for items that have sold, and one for items that didn't sell after being relisted once. You might choose to organize by category or month or whatever works for you.

To launch your listing, you must first add it to the Waiting to Upload list. You have the option to have the listing launch immediately upon upload, or schedule it to launch at a set time up to 21 days from upload. There is a 10-cent fee for each scheduled listing. Scheduled listings that have been uploaded but have not yet launched can be previewed, edited, and rescheduled online.

Summary

Overall I give Turbo Lister a thumbs up. The only real negative is the somewhat cumbersome multi-step process to create a new listing. I quickly found a way around that. I created a dummy listing with most of the item details blank, but all of the repetitive info filled in. I use the Duplicate tool to create copies of my dummy listing, then edit those copies to create my new listings. I find this much more efficient, since the edit page is a more compact form.

I created six new listings in just under an hour. That included writing all the descriptions, taking measurements, and computing shipping weight as I was doing so. If you are looking for a tool that allows you to create listings offline as your schedule permits, I would recommend giving Turbo Lister a look.

http://pages.ebay.com/turbo_lister

About the author:

Toby Aulman is a "student of glass", who enjoys researching glass as much as he does hunting for and finding glass treasures. He collects late Victorian Era blue opalescent glass. His primary area of study is American pressed patterns from the last 100 years, with an emphasis on poorly documented patterns from the 1940's to 1970's http://www.PixClix.com/glassproject/. When not buying, selling, or studying glass he works from home as a Web Developer http://www.abzoid.com. Toby also moderates the AuctionBytes Glass Forum.



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