Using Ebay Tools: Turbo Lister

While millions of resellers make use of Ebay everyday and get by acceptably making use of only the most basic of Ebay’s many user tools a high or even mid-level seller would be well served to familiarize themselves with some of the more advanced tools available. One of the most valuable and time saving features at Ebay might just be the Turbo Lister. Many Ebay Power Sellers have claimed that this is their favorite Ebay tool.

The Turbo Lister is a downloaded program available from Ebay that will allow a reseller to create multiple listing in one sitting. You can even quickly create auctions in wildly different auction categories. Using the tool you can create bulk listings and easily keep listing details handy for later use. Turbo Lister allows a seller to save default settings and quickly duplicate items, thus cutting down on future data entry time. You can also set your dates so that an auction begins at a future date of your choosing.

The program is closely connected with Ebay’s HTML editor. The editor, perplexingly called What You See Is What You Get or WYSIWYG, is famously simple to use and a tremendous boon to listers. The editor makes it a simple matter to create the product descriptions for all your listings. If your one of the bright types that likes to do your own HTML composition that too is easily done using Turbo Lister.

Turbo Lister can be downloaded from the Ebay site or acquired on a cd from the Ebay Shop. The downloaded form of the program is available in two different versions. The first is the Turbo Lister web setup. Once downloaded this version allows you to work online only to create your listings. This is the version recommended by Ebay for most users. The second version allows you to use the Turbo Lister off-line but takes up a great deal more space and is only recommended for people who sometimes work on a computer not connect to the Internet.

While use of the bulk lister is free you will still have to pay all the normal costs associated with listing an auction normally. This includes all insertion and final fees as well as any related to optional features, but the tool itself is free and adds no new expense.

There are, of course some limitations to the tool and as is so often the case they relate to Mac users. Turbo Lister will work with Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. You’ll notice that this list contains no version of Apple’s OS operating systems. Ebay tells us that they are considering a Mac version of Turbo Lister but at present Mac users will have to do without. It is possible to find Ebay listing tools that will work with OS 10 and other versions by looking for third party sources.

As long as we’re on the subject, the minimum systems requirements needed to run the tool are nothing to concern yourself with overly unless your computer is hopelessly out of date. You need 64 MB of RAM and at least 20 MB of free space on your hard drive. Obviously you must be connected to the Internet with at least a 28 kb per second.

Turbo Lister users that run into difficulties can either contact Ebay support or visit the Turbo Lister Discussion Board on the site. Personally I have nearly always found discussion boards to be better sources of help and information than any established help service. This judgment goes far beyond Ebay to include just about every web service I’ve looked at.

Although the Turbo Listing tool has been available from Ebay for some time they are still inviting feedback. They promise that all input will lead to improvements on the tools. Ebay provides a special link just to collect users opinions of the Turbo Listing tool.

Art Mickelwraith is the author of the Wholesale Buyer's Guide at TopTenWholesale.com. He can be reached at artmicklewraith@gmail.com.

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Using Ebay Tools: Turbo Lister