eBay assistant dropped

eBay.com have released a news update announcing today that as of the 15th of September they will literally drop the Bid Assistant. This was added by eBay sometime in May 2007, Bid Assistant let people mainly buyers to specifically choose a large group of stuff they want to buy, the eBay tool then would start bidding for each product on different turns, then it would automatically move on to the next item if it failed to outbid everyone else.

eBay’s news release says the whole tool has had very little use, which they also said that thought this would happen: as the people who are Internet friendly enough to use the feature have found other methods and better offers with better tools. Bid Assistant has a fatal floor as it doesn’t have the option to bid at the last second to outbid the last bidders. You have to appreciate that eBay couldn’t do this as the whole point of last minute bidding is to the price of sales as cheap as possible. But as you can imagine without this option the tool is pretty pointless.

eBay - Turbo Lister

Turbo Lister is a desktop application for eBay that allows sellers to create listings easily and upload them in seconds. I use Turbo Lister and find it very useful, especially when I’m travelling as I can work offline. The Turbo Lister interface is a table which allows you to input item information such as price and title easily. It also means you don’t have to go through eBay’s cumbersome interface.

My favourite features:

• Pre-filled item information which appears when you start to enter information for the listing, this saves lots of time, especially with books and films.
• Design view, this allows you to view what your listing will look like whilst you edit it.
• The ability to log in with multiple eBay accounts, this means you can access your listings for different accounts through one application , quickly and easily.

Overall I’d rate Turbo Lister as an essential for the determined eBayer.

Firefox Companion for eBay

Version 1.5 of the Firefox Companion for eBay has been released today. Firefox is a browser which many argue is better than Internet Explorer, I’d recommend it- especially for serious eBayers. The latest version of this addon speeds up buying, selling and giving feedback. It also includes a verification tool which ensures that sites you visit are indeed created by eBay and PayPal (there have been a lot of spoof websites set up to trick people).

Features:

• View my eBay quickly
• Monitor auctions you’re bidding on
• Recieve activity alerts