Review: iSale - Easy eBay Solution

iSale
Review by: Katie
http://www.equinux.com/us/products/isale
Price: $39.95

I have mixed emotions about eBay, mostly because selling on eBay has always been a bit of a pain. I’d have to take pictures of my item and if I wanted more than one picture in my eBay listing I’d have to host the photo on my own .Mac webspace and then figure out how to link to those photos. If I wanted something other than simple text and a photo that eBay offers then I’d have to open up an html editor and create something more compelling. Once that’s all done, I’d have to copy the code, open up my browser and go through another half-dozen webpages to list my item on eBay. As I said, it was a pain, until iSale came around.

iSale is an all in one eBay solution. I can do everything I mentioned above, without ever leaving the iSale application and upload directly to eBay. iSale had a number of built-in templates that I can simply drag and drop photos from my iPhoto library and type and format text as easily as if I were writing an email. Since my MacBook has a built-in iSight camera, I could even take a quick snapshot of my item from within the iSale application. iSale will also upload additional photos to your .Mac or other webspace so you don’t have to pay eBay for each additional photos you want to add to your listings. Creating good looking eBay auctions no longer requires learning basic html code or being forced to use plain text and takes a fraction of the time. Because iSale links with eBay in the background, you can submit your auction to eBay from right within the application. It will even calculate estimated shipping and confirm the cost to list your item with eBay before your submission is final. If you do a lot of selling or have your own eBay Store, iSale can manage all of that too. Anything and everything you normally had to do on eBay’s website can now be done in iSale. New in iSale 5 is the ability to include videos in your auctions, which can be pretty helpful especially to demonstrate the item in question is in good working condition. There is also a new research assistant that will help you gather and collect information about your item to include in your auction.

Creating and listing items on eBay isn’t all iSale will do. iSale will also let your monitor all of your eBay auctions, let you see how many hits your actions are receiving, allow your to schedule auctions through iCal, and manage your items post-sale. My favorite feature is the iSale widget, I can monitor all of my eBay auctions in simple list format in my dashboard without having to sign into eBay or open up the iSale application.

I consider myself to be a pretty light eBay seller, I usually only sell a handful of items a year and I’ve already found this to be a great timesaving application. I can only imagine how useful this would be to “power sellers” or people who run their own eBay stores. Before I started using iSale, I had a pile of stuff in my closet that I was going to “get around to posting on eBay when I had time,” now there’s simply no excuse.