As you just read, eBay Selling Manager isn't perfect. One of its biggest problems is that you pretty much have to manage one auction at a time; it lacks features that let you manage multiple auctions in bulk. If you're a high-volume seller, a better solution is eBay's higher-end Selling Manager Pro, which does offer bulk management features (including bulk listing). For $15.99 per month, Selling Manager Pro does everything the basic Selling Manager does, plus more. It sends email messages in bulk, leaves feedback in bulk, manages inventory items and issues restock alerts, and generates a monthly profit and loss reportincluding all eBay fees and cost of goods sold. It's obviously meant to compete directly with the offerings from Ándale, Vendio, and other third parties.

inkFrog (www.inkfrog.com), shown in Figure 19.7, is kind of a bargain-basement auction service. All of its services are available for a flat $9.95 per month, which makes it extremely popular among cost-conscious sellers.

Figure 19.7. The inkFrog website.

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The current inkFrog is actually quite a bit different from the inkFrog of just a year ago; that's because inkFrog recently aquired SpareDollar, and integrated many of SpareDollar's services into its own feature set. inkFrog's auction tools include image hosting, listing creation/scheduling, post-auction emails and management, inventory management, page counters, consignment track-ing/management, and more.

Note, however, that while inkFrog is attractively priced, its services might prove too limited for some high-volume sellers. That said, many high-volume sellers do use inkFrog, and are quite happy with the results. Give it a try to see if it fits your particular eBay business.

Vendio (www.vendio.com), shown in Figure 19.8, is another long-established full-service auction management site. (The company was formerly known as Auctionwatch, back in the old days.)

Figure 19.8. The Vendio web-site.

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Vendio Sales Manager is a powerful set of listing creation and auction management tools. You can use Sales Manager not only to create new item listings, but also to manage all of your current and post-auction activity. Sales Manager will automatically generate end-of-auction emails, print invoices and packing slips, and upload customer feedback to eBay.

Vendio offers Sales Manager in both Inventory and Merchandising Editions; the mix of features is a little different between the two, but the pricing is the same. The company tries to appeal to different types of sellers by offering a mix of fixed- and variable-priced monthly subscriptions, as shown in Table 19.4.