Auctiva Blog

We are proud to have been able to provide you with our eBay listing and marketing tools for free all this time. You might have already read in our Community Forums or elsewhere that, starting in July, we will begin charging for some of our features.

I wanted to post here to let you know how we came to this decision, what it means for you, and what we are doing to make this transition as smooth as possible for all of our users.

Why the Change?

We did not come to this decision lightly. In fact, this adjustment was difficult for us to imagine after four years of being a completely free service.

In order to remain free all these years, our business model included many different sources of revenue. In addition to shipping insurance and our other pay services, like Sellathon.com, we also derived more than half of our income from eBay’s affiliate program.

As you are surely aware, there have been many changes in the world of eBay and e-commerce. Until now, we have been able to remain free despite these shifts. However, eBay recently made changes to its affiliate program that greatly restricted, and ultimately eliminated, this critical revenue stream. As a result, we will have to begin charging for some of our services to ensure we can continue to support our site, adapt our listing services to eBay’s planned changes and develop new tools to help you succeed in all your e-commerce ventures.

We remain committed to providing you with great tools—that save you time and help you maximize your profits—at a great value. In an effort to meet this commitment, we’ve worked hard to develop pricing plans that will be affordable for all sellers.

Fair & Flexible Pricing

We want to make this transition as easy as possible for you. With much time and careful consideration, we have developed five pricing packages to best meet the needs of the many different types of eBay sellers who use Auctiva. In addition, the Auctiva Scrolling Gallery will remain free as will a several of our other great marketing tools.

We will help you select the plan that will offer you the lowest rates. Once the site is fully released, if we have 60-90 days of eBay sales data for you, your Best Plan choice¹ will be highlighted for you.

Remember, if we have 60-90 days of eBay sales data for you, you can estimate your fees and determine your Best Plan right now with this pricing calculator.

We will begin implementing the necessary changes on our site to accommodate our new pricing structure during the first week of June. As a valued customer, you’ll have 30 days to evaluate and select the pricing plan that best suits you. Rest assured, no new fees will be incurred for any activity in June.

Where to Get Answers

You can preview our new pricing plan comparison table here. We have posted several informative FAQs and are responding to users’ questions in a couple of dedicated discussions we’ve created in our community forums. We have also posted links to two webinars we’ll be holding for users next week. We will be monitoring our forums all weekend to help you get your questions answered as quickly as possible.

Your business is very important to us. If there is anything we can do to ease this transition for you, please contact Customer Support. Our support staff will be working long hours to answer your questions as quickly as possible.

Thank you again for your business and loyalty. We look forward to continuing to provide you the services you’ve come to enjoy, as well as others to be developed in the future.

Sincerely,

Jeff Schlicht—CEO, Auctiva Corporation

¹Best plans choices are based on availability of eBay sales data > 60 days and if you had at least one listing in March 2009. We will take all listings and sales data from March, April, and May 2009 and average them. If we don’t have enough data to display your Best Plan and fees estimate, please contact Customer Support.

We’ve had a busy first quarter!

Over the last 12 months, Auctiva’s presence on eBay has grown exponentially. In order to accommodate this incredible growth, we’ve made changes to our infrastructure, instituted new procedures, adapted new policies and grown along with our customers.

If we’ve done our job well most of these changes will have occurred without any disruption or noticeable effect on you. In fact, all of the procedures and policies were implemented to ensure that your user experience remains, at the very least, unproblematic, if not more exuberant.

All kinds of upgrades

The most noticeable upgrade would be our improved navigation and user interaction for Auctiva.com. We’ve refined the web pages to help facilitate an even easier listing creation, more efficient auction management and overall smoother transactions.

One big improvement we’ve made is the improved release process for our software. We expanded our internal testing environments to be more responsive and efficient in development, and also added to a more involved quality assurance process with additional verification.

To handle the additional growth and improve reliability, we nearly doubled our server capacity and have rotated in more state-of-the-art hardware. We have also recently added additional third-party companies and tools to monitor and evaluate our site to ensure we’re compliant with industry-best security practices.

And finally, we have focused on expanding our staff to include additional senior-level engineers and technicians to help assist with our progress.

As we move forward…

Auctiva continues to make advancements to our technology to improve our services and meet the needs of our customers.

Welcome to the first-ever official Auctiva blog.

We’re excited that you’re joining us to learn more about Auctiva, as a company and as a product. For over 10 years, we’ve helped sellers become more efficient and profitable while selling on eBay. Our company has transformed with the changing platform and continues to offer robust features and insightful information.

Stay tuned as we provide product updates, exciting release information and of-the-moment entries surrounding the world of online auctions and e-Commerce.