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GarageSale Review
Auction
Software for Mac-Using eBay Marketers
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By Timothy Arends
Selling items on auction sites such as eBay is a major part of the
strategy of many Internet marketers, and there are a couple of
third-party interfaces or front ends for eBay, the most popular auction
site, aimed at making the process easier. One of these is GarageSale by
iwascoding. This software offers an attractive, Mac-like interface,
plenty of themes to make your auctions prettier, and a free picture
hosting service as part of the software.
The
basics of GarageSale are quite simple. To create an auction, you
first display the theme viewer at the top of the interface (this is
somewhat hidden and unintuitive; you must pull the theme viewer down
manually to display it) and choose a
theme you like.
The top of the auction window shows an
information panel somewhat
similar to item information at the top of all eBay auctions, except
that you can edit the information there to suit the item being
auctioned, or you can do so in the Inspector, if you prefer.
To add an image, you can add items that
are in iPhoto with the included media browser, which integrates
directly with iPhoto. You can also add items from the finder.
One nice bonus of GarageSale is that it
offers a free image
hosting service so that you do not have to find a third-party service
to host your auction images.
You can enter descriptive text for your auction in either preview or
edit mode, although the program displays a warning that the "text
formatting will have to be converted to HTML" if you try to edit in
preview mode. I'm not sure what the significance of this is, so I
always do my editing in edit mode.
You can set various sale options in GarageSale's Inspector palette.
There is a list of standard eBay auction categories from which you can
choose here. In addition, you can choose from the various auction
enhancements that eBay offers. You can set the auction duration,
starting bid, buy it now price, reserve price and payment and shipping
options from this panel.
To post your auction on eBay, you click the Start Auction button and
GarageSale will upload your auction to eBay.
The software occasionally updates itself with eBay, in order to
download new categories and sync itself to changes in the policies and
options of the eBay service, a nice feature.
The themes have various "looks" such as sports, books, music, teddy
bears, winter, and automobiles, as well as various color schemes. The
themes are quite attractive and will make your auction look better than
90% of the others on eBay (provided you can refrain from using a large
variety of font sizes and colors, the "ransom note" look which seems to
be all-too-common on the auction sites. If you lapse into the ransom
note look, all bets are off).
The themes can be sorted by such categories as "clean," "dark,"
"dynamic," and so on, but there is no search feature for the installed
themes, so, if you know you saw one pertaining to, say, music, you must
browse through the entire collection to find it.
 A
larger complaint about the themes is that they seem to be more
show than substance. The themes look pretty but none of them contain
default text that could be useful for certain types of auctions
or text that experts recommend you include in all auction descriptions,
such as places for size, type, material and condition, nor suggested
text for your store policy, etc.
You can always modify themes and save them as your own templates for
future use, but without the fancy Cover Flow browser. All in all, the
software seems to show a preference for form over substance in its
themes. It is unlikely that a pretty theme, much as we may enjoy the
look of it, will result in an item selling at a higher price.
Although the software is pretty well thought out, it does not exactly
make the process of setting up an auction on eBay for the first few
times particularly easy. If you are not familiar with the eBay rules,
you can still easily make mistakes. For example, I tried to check
"money order" as one of my payment options, only to find that
eBay returned an error message and the auction was canceled. It took me
some time before I figured out that the accepting of money orders is
not allowed unless this is set up beforehand with eBay.
Another error I received was "condition must be set for this category,"
even though I set the condition in two places in GarageSale. Because of
this one omission, an auction I attempted was rejected. What's more,
since GarageSale is a third-party "front end" to the eBay service, the
exact text in any error messages may not come from eBay itself but from
GarageSale, so that eBay's own support system may not be able to help
you with them.
Calculating shipping is another issue. This can be rather complex.
There is Domestic Shipping, Local Pickup Only, Special Shipping Terms,
Multiple Quantity Auctions, Calculated Shipping and International
Shipping.
There is no subsitute for weighing the item you want to sell and
figuring out shipping costs on your own. Shipping a 3-pound package via
Priority Mail costs anywhere from $5 - $12 depending on the zone it's
going to. GarageSale will not figure this out for you.
If you are selling several similar items simultaneously, you can offer
to combine shipping to encourage people to bid on multiple items, but
you won't get much assistance from GarageSale in this, either.
On the plus side, GarageSale has both e-mail support and an active
discussion group. GarageSale help is available in the form of an online
wiki, In an interface not unlike that of Wikipedia. On the one hand,
while this means that anybody can theoretically edit and improve the
online help to make it more useful, I have found that the online help
is currently not as complete as I might like. There is no contextual
help in GarageSale.
Scheduling an auction is also far from intuitive; the scheduling
interface would be easier to get a handle on if it bore more
resemblance to iCal.
The bottom line: GarageSale has an attractive interface and some nice
features, but it will not make the process of creating an auction on
eBay much easier for the beginner.
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