eBay: The Missing Manual

Chapter 9. Cool Tools for Sellers

If you're a small-volume or even a medium-volume seller—you auction off a handful of items a week, say—you can get by with doing everything by hand: listing your auctions with the Sell Your Item form (Section 5.4.2), following up with buyers after the sale (Section 5.6.1), leaving feedback (Section 5.6.4), and all the other niggling little details.

On the other hand, if you sell by the truckload, you're going to want software that helps you automate the selling process. And you have a lot of options to choose from, as you'll discover in this chapter. eBay is so popular, it's spawned a cottage industry just for automation software—everything from freebie programs that help you create listings in batches to high-dollar analysis tools that graph your sales so you can figure out what's selling best and why.

Not everyone needs a bulk listing tool, but most sellers will find something here that they can use to make selling on eBay easier and more fun. This chapter describes software you can use for:

• Automating the listing process.

• Managing your auctions once they're running.

• Linking your eBay sales directly to your accounting software.

• Analyzing your sales (and others') to spot trends and problems.

• Automating post-auction tasks, such as leaving feedback and tracking disputes.

eBay Tools

When you're looking around for tools to help you automate selling, see what eBay has to offer. One advantage of using eBay's tools is that when eBay makes changes to the ...