by Noah Kravitz, Reviews Editor

8 March 2006

eBay Listings Made Easy

I saw the iWasCoding booth at MacWorld last month and had to check out version 2 of GarageSale, their application for making eBay selling easier for OS X users. I'm an admitted eBay-aholic, and while I'm more of a buyer than a seller, I have made a chunk of pocket change selling goodies on the bay over the years. Thing is, I also have a closet full of stuff that I keep saying I'm going to sell ... But sitting down to actually list the things is just such a drag.

So the idea of an easy to use, template-driven program that would let me create auction listings in a familiar interface, post them when in bunches, and alter and re-use them as needed sounded great. And great it is: GarageSale is the best way this side of a crazy auctioneer uncle to get your stuff out of storage and onto the auction block.

Templates and Offline Listings
GarageSale comes with a multitude of built-in templates that make it easy to spruce up your eBay listings. Not only is GarageSale's interface much easier and faster than eBay's method of auction listing, but applying a template to your action in GarageSale is a one-click process that's easy to preview and undo in favor of another template. The templates look good and provide an easy way to give your auction listings a professional look. I wish the templates were a bit easier to customize - for instance, the I really like the "Shining Blue" and "Shining Red" templates but wish I could get rid of the upper-right hand corner button graphics they employ - but that's not such a big deal.

Sellers who often list multiple instances of the same or similar items on eBay will really benefit from GarageSale's ability to save and reuse templates. The left-hand column of GarageSale's interface is devoted to managing your templates, and it's very easy to grab an old template, tweak it a bit (change starting/reserve prices, revise a description, etc.) and use it to start a new auction.

GarageSale also lets you compose listings offline and then upload them to eBay when you're back on the Internet, which is a great function for anyone who does a lot of business on the Bay and wants to get some work done on an airplane or anywhere else where Internet access isn't available. Each time I launch the program, GarageSale automatically downloads current auction data from eBay, as well, which makes it easy to keep track of current auction status.

GarageSale also provides great integration with iPhoto, iSight cameras, and Delicious Library for easy use of photos in your auctions. The program also features support for retrieving My eBay messages and listing fees information. Essentially, there's not much that most eBay sellers will want to do that GarageSale isn't made to handle - you can literally use GarageSale to manage almost all of your selling activity without actually firing up a web browswer and going to eBay.com.

Almost Perfect
There are a few minor issues with GarageSale that keep it from "perfect app" status. First, the aforementioned inability to easily edit templates or create your own is a bit of a pain. To be fair, template creation is possible, but it involves opening the GarageSale application package and delving into some script editing that gets much more complicated than the program's easy-to-use GUI. The process is very well documented in the included .pdf format User's Guide, but it will be over the head of your average eBay user.

Next, I simply couldn't figure out how to relist an unsold item (taking advantage of eBay's second chance for sellers) using GarageSale. I had to go to eBay's website and relist the item using their manual process. And last, drag-and-drop support for importing text descriptions from databases and other apps doesn't work. For casual sellers this won't be a problem, but if you manage multiple eBay listings using a database, this can be a serious issue. For more on this, read this user comment on VersionTracker.

Overall: A Killer App for OS X eBayers
These few issues notwithstanding, GarageSale is an excellent tool for anyone who sells more than one or two things a month on eBay. Using GarageSale to list and manage your auctions is faster and easier than going to eBay's site, and if you sell similar or identical items often you'll find GarageSale's efficiency a godsend.

A look around the Web also found several GarageSale user groups and discussion threads, and a common theme quickly emerged from them: iWasCoding is serious about customer support and developing new releases of GarageSale that fix bugs and offer features design to respond to customer's needs and wishes. You can't ask for much more from an application than that ... except for a fair price. $24.99 for a single-user license of GarageSale is more than fair, it's a bargain. And the free demo version allows for uploading of three auctions to get you started. What can I say, GarageSale is an excellent application.

GarageSale is available for download direct from iWasCoding's website. A single-user license is $24.99 and a five-user family pack is $44.99. The unlicensed trial version will allow three listings to be posted to eBay.

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