The place to keep up with online Auction News
Written: Jun 14 '00
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AuctionWatch offers a tremendous variety of services to both sellers and buyers. But mainly it is the message boards that I find most useful. It is here that you will find the very latest news and rumors relating to the business of online auctions. Everything you read on the boards must be taken with a grain of salt, but you can find a lot of useful information there. When eBay is going to have a free listing day, often the news will break on the auctionWatch board before it is announced on eBay's own announcements board. New services for online auction sellers are discussed there as well.
But you have to be careful. As a salesperson, which is what an online auction seller is essentially, you must try to avoid joining "the club" on AuctionWatch. What is "the club"? It is a group of persons who perpetually whine and moan about how unfair eBay is and how horribly eBay treats sellers. eBay does do annoying things but posting angry tirades on AuctionWatch, as these people do, is counter-productive. Adapt to any changes, present a moving target, that's how to survive. Nothing will make you ineffective as a businessperson quicker than joining "the club".
One of the best features of AuctionWatch is the AuctionManager software. The software is free to download from the AuctionWatch site. It's a pretty hefty file so allow some time. It is well worth the effort. This software lets you create batches of auctions offline which you can upload en masse when you are ready. I've tried eBay's Mister Lister and AuctionManager beats it hands down. You can schedule the start times for each auction which is extremely useful. Being able to have all of the "auction forms" filled out offline will shave hours off your listing time. There are templates included with AuctionManager that you can use to generate your ads. Or you can use your own html. You can use AuctionManager to list auctions on Yahoo and Amazon as well.
AuctionWatch also offers image hosting as a stand alone service and also integrated with AuctionManager.
For buyers AuctionWatch offers a "Universal Search" which will comb through the listings on numerous online auction sites. I have rarely used this since by and large if you don't find an item on eBay you probably won't find it anywhere. For a time eBay blocked the Universal Search, then AuctionWatch worked around that and last I heard you could still use it to search eBay.
The site is easy to use and intuitive to navigate. Load times can be slow on the message boards because there are so many messages. Generally speaking online sellers should check in to get the latest scoops in the online auction business. Sellers will find the AuctionManager software very helpful.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
mustpar65
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Reviews written: 14
Trusted by: 2 members
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