Henry Ford knew the value of automation. So does the McDonald’s restaurant mega-chain. Once you get the hang of selling at auction, you’re likely to jump in the game with both feet and start to sell lots of items at once. As your eBay business grows and you can prepare sales more quickly, the more you’ll want to automate tasks that are repetitious. Why? The more time you save, the more sales you’ll be able to list, and the greater the revenue those sales can generate. At the same time, you’ll be able to focus on the parts of your eBay business that really interest you: creating and describing merchandise, finding merchandise you can sell, completing transactions, and other good things. This article discusses ways you can speed up your business and run it more efficiently so as to reduce stress at the same time you boost your productivity. You can automate the process of publishing photos online, keeping records of your sales income, and maintaining data about your sales. These are ambitious goals, but they are ones you need to shoot for if you want to make a steady living on eBay.

Start with eBay’s Management Tools The logical place to start is with the tools eBay provides its own sellers, which are described in the following sections. If you need help or have questions, you can access the message boards for any of these software tools and get help from other users and eBay staff people who monitor discussions. eBay provides a variety of software options for creating groups of sales listings, formatting them with user-friendly design elements, tracking sales while they’re online, and even sending automated e-mail responses and printing out labels in order to complete transactions in a more streamlined fashion. In fact, it can be somewhat confusing when it comes time to choose between the eBay sales tools because their functions overlap in some respects. Another bulk listing tool that’s been around on eBay for several years, Mister Lister, is being phased out at this writing. Mister Lister users are encouraged to use Turbo Lister instead.

Speed Things Up with Turbo Lister Turbo Lister (http://pages.ebay.com/turbo_lister) is software that you download and install, and that eBay provides to sellers for free. It enables sellers to sell lots of items at the same time, and to design those sales by means of templates that enable them to format descriptions without having to know HTML. Finally, you can manage the items you create with Turbo Lister scheduling them to all start and end at a specified time, or duplicate sales details so you can use them over if needed. Turbo Lister presents you with a wizard-like interface. A wizard is a set of screens orWeb pages that leads you through a particular set of procedures. The Turbo Lister wizard should be familiar to anyone who has used the Sell Your Item form.

Install and Use Turbo Lister

1. Start up Internet Explorer and go to the Turbo Lister Download page (http://pages.ebay.com/turbo_lister/download.html).

2. Click Web Setup. If a Security Warning dialog box appears, click Yes to proceed with the download.

3. After the Turbo Lister Setup application downloads, the InstallShield Wizard application opens. Follow the steps presented by the wizard to download the full set of Turbo Lister software.

4. Once installation is complete, The Turbo Lister application should open automatically, and the Welcome to Turbo Lister screen should appear, with the heading “What would you like to do?”

5. You could choose Open a sample Turbo Lister file to see how a finished file might look. For this example, choose “Set up a new Turbo Lister file,” then click Next.

6. In the next screen, enter your eBay User ID and password, then click Next.

7. In the next screen, click Connect Now and Turbo Lister will connect eBay to retrieve your account information. Once your account information has been retrieved, click File | New | Item from the Turbo Lister menu bar to open Create a New Item wizard.

8. Choose the country you want to sell in, and choose a format for your sale an auction, a store, or a real estate advertisement. Click Next.

9. Enter a title for your item in the Item Title drop-down list.

10. Either enter the category number, if you know it, in the Category box, or click Find Category.

11. Click the plus signs next to the categories in the Select a Category box to pick the category where you want to sell the item.

12. Click the Add/Change button in the Specifics section to enter item specifics if you want to. Then click OK.

13. Click Next. The next screen of the wizard, which is entitled “Step 2 of 3 – Design Your Listing,” gives you something the Sell Your Item form doesn’t: a user-friendly HTML editor that enables you to choose a design template for your auction listing. Even if you don’t use Turbo Lister for bulk auction listings, it’s worth installing the software just to get this feature. In the Themes box on the left side of the screen, choose a design from the Themes list. In the Layout section, choose a layout for your item’s photos. You can specify that they appear to the left of the description, to the right, at the top, at the bottom, or as a series of images called a Slide Show.

14. Insert a photo by clicking the box labeled “Click Here to Insert a Picture.” In the Insert Picture – eBay Picture Services section, click the Look In drop-down menu to locate a photo on your hard disk that you want to include with the description. Click Insert to add the image. Then click in the text box (the box enclosed by dashed lines) to position the text cursor so you can type your item description or paste it from a text file. Click Preview to make sure your layout looks the way you want. Then click Next. Turbo Lister is free to download and use. It’s the successor to a utility called Mister Lister that enabled eBay sellers to put dozens of auctions online at once. You can download the software directly from http://pages.ebay.com/ turbo_lister/download.html and find a full set of system requirements as well. The software does not work on Macintosh systems, however; it’s supported by Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, and XP. You need 20MB of hard disk space to use the software. If you’d rather use a CD-ROM to install the software rather than downloading the 18MB worth of files (perhaps you have a slow connection), you can obtain it for a $2.99 handling fee from eBay-o-rama, eBay’s online store (http://www.ebayorama.com ).

15. Click Next to open the “Step 3 of 3 – Format Specifics” page, where you add specific details about your listing such as the duration of the sale, the starting bid, and the reserve price. When you’re done, click Save. You return to the Turbo Lister main screen, where this auction and any others you have created are listed.

16. When you’re ready to start your sales, select them from the list and click Add to Upload. If you want to schedule your sales to go online automatically, select them, then click Schedule to start on, and enter a date or time.

If you have questions about Turbo Lister or have problems using the software, check the Turbo Lister Discussion Board (http://forums.ebay.com/ forum.jsp?forum=34). You can see if someone else has encountered the same problem, or ask a question if you need help.

Use eBay’s Selling Manager Turbo Lister is a terrific selling tool, but it does require some overhead after all, you have to download and install the program so you can run it on your computer. Another sales management tool that eBay provides, Selling Manager, is one that you don’t download at all. Rather, you access it at http://pages.ebay.com/selling_ manager. You sign up to use the service free for 30 days; if you decide to keep using the service, eBay charges you $4.99 per month. Selling Manager, like Turbo Lister, provides you with sales templates that you can use to design your auction listings. It also lets you schedule auctions and manage ones that are already online. You can even use it to print shipping labels or relist groups of items that you didn’t sell the first time around. eBay provides Turbo Lister so you can create groups of auction listings and get them online; it gives you Selling Manager so you can manage your sales once they’re online, and complete transactions in a more automated fashion. You can use Selling Manager to keep track of your sales on all areas of eBay except the fixed-price sales you list on Half.com (see Article 14). You need Internet Explorer 4.0 or later, Netscape Navigator 3.0 or later, or AOL Web browser 3.0 or later to use Selling Manager. However, because it’s a tool you access online rather than run on your own computer, you don’t need to worry about special memory and processing requirements. Selling Manager is built into another eBay feature that is normally of interest primarily to auction buyers a starting page called My eBay that lets you track items you’ve bid on and items you’ve purchased. When you subscribe to Selling Manager, your My eBay page is given an additional section in which your pending auction listings are listed. Selling Manager also gives you seven preformatted e-mail messages that you can use to answer questions from prospective bidders and complete transactions after an auction ends. One thing to keep in mind is that the original My eBay page (which is free) already has a Selling tab that lets you track sales. I suggest that you try the free version of My eBay before you move up to Selling Manager, which is really useful only if you begin to sell dozens of items a month.

Use Seller’s Assistant Seller’s Assistant is software that enables you to create and manage your sales. At this writing, it comes in two versions, Basic and Pro.

Seller’s Assistant Basic The Basic version’s features are mainly covered by a newer product, SellingManager, which will eventually replace it. If you haven’t yet chosen any sales tool, I advise you to pick Turbo Lister and Selling Manager, which let you create and manage sales items with just about all of the functionality of Seller’s Assistant Basic. Frankly, I find the eBay’s selling software somewhat confusing, and because Selling Manager is now available, I think you should skip using Seller’s Assistant Basic because it’s going to be phased out anyway.

Seller’s Assistant Pro Seller’s Assistant Pro is a souped-up version of Seller’s Assistant that is designed for eBay sellers who sell all the time and need to automate tasks such as leaving feedback for many customers at once, or printing sales reports for tax purposes. These are two features the program performs that aren’t covered by the other eBay software mentioned earlier in this article. Here are some others:

- You can create macros (a recorded series of steps that you perform on an application) so you can repeat just about any task you perform on eBay with your Web browser.

- You can generate invoices for your customers.

- You can automatically fill in feedback for your customers not very personal, but a real time-saver. The question you need to ask yourself is this: do these advanced features make Seller’s Assistant Pro worth $15.99 a month? Is it also worth downloading the 20MB file and installing the program on your computer? One advantage of using Seller’s Assistant Pro (or Basic, for that matter) is the number of templates from which you can choose. Turbo Lister, the free software tool described earlier in this article, only provides you with about ten templates. The Seller’s Assistant packages come with 20 different designs. Another advantage is the fact that both versions of Seller’s Assistant include a spell-checker so you can make sure your auction descriptions don’t contain any obvious typos. If you don’t like a particular typeface or color that’s included with one of the Seller’s Assistant templates, you can always click the Edit button and customize a template so it looks just the way you want. You can find out more about both Seller’s Assistant Basic and Pro at http://pages.ebay.com/sellers_assistant/index.html.

Find a Third-Party Auction Manager Not so long ago, you had to hire an outside auction management service to perform slick sales-type functions like sending out automated e-mail announcements to each of your high bidders after a sale ends, or scheduling your sales to go online while you’re not even at your computer. eBay has since come up with Turbo Lister and Selling Manager so advanced sellers can accomplish such automated tasks. Nevertheless, you still might want to install third-party software (software that’s made for managing eBay sales, but provided by a company other than eBay). Or you might want to secure the services of a company that will manage your eBay sales for you so you can concentrate on answering e-mail, finding new inventory, or shipping out items you’ve sold. Both options are described in the sections that follow.

Auction Software: Auction Wizard 2000 Auction Wizard was created by Standing Wave Software, Inc. in 1999 to handle the estate sale of a pair of Hollywood memorabilia collectors whose estate was being liquidated on eBay. A more full-featured version of that product, Auction Wizard 2000, was subsequently developed to help especially active eBay sellers manage their sales activities. In addition to giving you the ability to format auctions, send automated feedback, and upload multiple sales, the program is especially strong in its ability to handle “back end” functions of an eBay operation, including:

- Managing your inventory If you take the time to record each of the items in your warehouse or storage area, Auction Wizard will keep track of remaining inventory as items are sold.

- Keeping tabs on income and expenses If you record your expenses and income in Auction Wizard’s interface, you enable the program to perform basic accounting functions that can prove helpful at tax time.

- Printing invoices and reports Auction Wizard performs these tasks for a more affordable fee than eBay’s own Seller’s Assistant Pro. Auction Wizard 2000 also gives you the ability to import images from a variety of image formats and convert them to the standard Web image formats, GIF and JPEG. A built-in image editor lets you rotate, crop, and otherwise manipulate images so they appear in a compact format that doesn’t interfere with your description. You can even use AuctionWizard as a full-fledgedWeb page creation tool to create your own Web sites. Some Auction Wizard 2000 users are so satisfied with the program that they have started their own discussion boards to share tips about it and answer one another’s questions. It’s a great place to go if you want to learn about the pros and cons of the software from people who actually use it. One board, created by user Jacki Espino (eBay User ID katiebird), is located at http://pub83.ezboard.com/ bauctionwizarddiscussionboard. Jacki’s sales give you an idea of how Auction Wizard can be used to format listings on eBay. Of course, Auction Wizard 2000 isn’t the only auction software in town. Other popular programs include:

- AuctionSubmit (http://www.auctionsubmit.com )

- AuctionTamer (http://www.auctiontamer.com )

- eLister (http://www.blackmagik.com/elister.html ), which is notable because it is designed to work specifically with the Macintosh operating system (version 8.5 or later) Find out more about Auction Wizard 2000 at http://www.auctionwizard2000.com . You can try the program out free for 60 days. After that, you must purchase a one-year license for $75. The license must be renewed each year for $50.