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.