The hood of an automobile hides the complexity going on underneath. Beneath that single smooth metal panel is a flurry of activity: belts whirring, pistons firing, fans turning and fluids churning.

At Auctiva, I am privileged to be a part of what goes on “under the hood” of our products. For Auctiva.com, here’s a quick recap of what we accomplished this year, and an inside look.

This year, we performed about 100 updates to the Auctiva.com website and services. Each release contained anywhere from a handful to hundreds of enhancements or bug fixes. These are carefully choreographed to minimize disruption. While there were hundreds of minor improvements, we introduced several key features. We added the ability for you to create shipping labels efficiently and economically, to send your buyers a customized newsletter and share your eBay listings on Facebook.

Making incremental enhancements and rapidly responding to sellers’ needs has been—and continues to be—a priority.

Improvements didn’t just include adding functionality. We also refined the features we already had. For example, we updated the Sales page and other areas of the website to make getting started, or handling your daily business, more efficient. If your native language is German (Guten Tag!) or Mandarin Chinese (Ni Hao!), you probably noticed our site-wide translation effort for our international sites.

In this year, we also broke the mark of providing more than 1,800 professionally designed listing templates for you to select.

In 2011 we also released our Auctiva iPhone mobile app. Now, from the convenience of your iPhone, you can snap photos, create listings using your Auctiva settings and then post those directly to eBay. And speaking of mobile, we also gave away an iPad 2 in one of our many contests this past year.

Of course, eBay made a few changes as well. To keep in step with its seller-policy changes, we modified third-party checkout, return policies, item specifics and external links. Our teams also kept all internal and production systems running at peak performance 24/7, yearlong, while also preparing our systems for growth into next year.

In fact, though more sellers joined Auctiva.com this year and our sellers had all-time record listing volumes to eBay, we didn’t see a correlating increase in the volume of customer support cases. I’d like to think this is due not only to our ongoing commitment to continual quality improvement but also our proactive approach to communicating with our sellers via FAQs, video tutorials and weekly webinars.

So, even though Auctiva’s “car hood” will remain closed in 2012, rest assured there’s a bustle of activity underneath. We’ve been planning the product roadmaps for next year, and our engine will definitely be humming!

Last month we introduced our newest feature to Auctiva.com: Integrated Shipping Labels! No fancy name or additional subscriptions needed to use this great feature. It’s just an easy-to-use tool that allows our customers to generate shipping labels and pay for postage right from their Auctiva accounts.

Why add this feature? The main reason is to add value for you, and make Auctiva more of a “one stop shop” for all your eBay selling needs. We’re always looking for ways to save sellers time, and this was an obvious solution. It took us some time to release this feature since we’ve been spending most of our time keeping up with recent eBay policy changes, which is always our first priority. But now our Integrated Shipping Labels feature is live and ready to use.

This feature is accessible on our redesigned Sales page in your Auctiva account. Keeping the feature as simple to use as possible was very important to us. We always strive for ease of use. In fact, when you click  the “Get shipping label” icon next to one of your transactions, the details to create the label will appear and, basically, all you have to do is enter the USPS service you want to use, specify the package type, size, weight and dimensions, and labels are ready to print.

Other options are available, too. For instance, you can buy a shipping label and add our Auctiva Shipping Insurance. You can also print labels for Certified Mail and get Signature Confirmation Service. Users can also print labels for USPS First Class International packages as well as Priority International and Express International. You can even print out a packing slip at the same time as your shipping label; you’ll just need to set that up in your Shipping Preferences before you print. To access these options, go to your My Account tab then click on “Settings” then click “Shipping Labels.”

You can print out the labels on plain 8.5-inch-by-11-inch paper, or use the self-adhesive label stock that has one or two labels per sheet. We hope to add support for thermal label printers that print 4-inch-by-6-inch labels in the near future.

Check out this great new feature and let us know what you think.

Auctiva’s eBay template count just surpassed 1,800! We used to be at 1,700+—I’m sure you saw that number several places on our site—but we’ve been busy creating and adding more than 35 new listing designs, and now we’re at 1,800+!

If you haven’t been to our Template Library recently, you need to check in and browse our latest additions. You won’t be at a loss for choices!

Templates featuring vector illustrations, photography, fun and lively patterns, spring colors, holiday themes and mobile-optimized designs are all waiting for your listings. Also included in this new batch are template designs inspired by our customers’ suggestions, including Sassy Beads, Rustic, Pink Flower, Zebra, Color Burst, Bold Spring, Verdure and the Fine Line series—all created due to popular demand.

We’re not stopping here, though. We’re already working on an even larger selection of templates, so you can find the perfect one for your listings.

My favorite new templates are Fresh, Frothy, Pink Flower and Coastal. These designs were the first time I used photos as soft backdrops. Styles change over the years and Auctiva’s designers want to keep current. These new templates are reflective of current tastes, and trends.  We now have a larger selection of templates without images, which are an ideal file size for mobile applications.

And suggestions for new templates are always welcome! The key is to suggest a design that doesn’t contain a brand name or other elements that might infringe on copyright laws. For instance, I can design a mermaid template, but I can’t design a Disney “The Little Mermaid” template. Or I could make a motorcycle template, but it can’t contain a Harley-Davidson logo.

The more general the template suggestion, the better. In fact, a suggestion for a basic beach theme would more likely be chosen than a too-specific suggestion, such as Maui sunset with a palm tree in the upper left and beach umbrella in the bottom corner with shells on the tags.

If you have a suggestions click here, or leave us a comment below.

It’s a brand new year, and if you want to jump-start 2011 by revamping your listings, we have all the tools to help you do that! Our new templates are live and ready for your use. Check them out and let us know if you have any suggestions. Happy listing!

Over the past few months we’ve released several enhancements. These new features are sure to make listing easier and more convenient for you.

As an active eBay seller and Auctiva user, of course, I was very excited when our team of developers, engineers and programmers decided to implement many of these features.

They will save you time—and as we all know, time is money!

The first feature I campaigned for was the ability to edit most fields in a closed listing before relisting it. Our Bulk Edit feature only allows users to edit the title, price and a few other fields in a listing. But our new Advanced Relist Editing tool lets you edit the description, category, shipping details, even the template and photos. I can’t count how many times I’ve listed something with a holiday template, and it didn’t sell. Then I wanted to it with a different template but didn’t know how. Ah, what a blessing this new feature is!

Our new Auto-save feature should also make many happy, especially if you lose power, Internet connectivity or get timed out of your Auctiva account when you’re writing a description. This feature automatically saves a draft of your description (not the whole listing, but just what’s in the description editor box) that you can recover if you encounter one of these problems.

I remember typing a long description for a lot of beads I was selling once, carefully describing each pack along with the manufacturer’s item number. Then the power went out when I was almost done. I wanted to scream. All my work was gone!

But I blame myself for not saving the description to my computer first, and for trying to list during a thunderstorm. Now if that happens, a copy of my description will be saved and I will be able to recover it.

Here are a few of our other recent enhancements that should help you this selling season:

Bulk Live-Listing Revision Tool: Edit multiple listings at once.

Auto-Purchase Rules: Buy and manage your policies easily. An added plus to this feature is that you’ll get a 20 percent discounted on our already discounted policies through the end of the year when you enable this feature.

Customizable packing slips: Build your brand by including these in your shipments.

Ship-to Exclusion: Specify which countries you will not ship to when you create a new listing.

New templates: Choose from our holiday themes or one you can use year-round.

We’ve also reactivated spell-check and added new help documentation for your convenience.

Auctiva’s graphic design department has been busy creating new templates to give you a variety of choices for the upcoming holiday season.

Our new “Thanksgiving Dinner” is the first in a series featuring a vector-illustrated modern woman who knows how to celebrate the holidays in style. The series will include Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Independence Day and Halloween templates.

“Mr. Frosty” is a new Christmas template featuring everyone’s favorite snowman. And we didn’t stop there. “Santa’s Helper” and “Christmas Elf” are fun vector-illustrated templates, great for auctions geared toward kids and kids at heart.

We were feeling the color pink as we designed these new templates. Our “Polka Dot Porpoise,” “Pinky Cat,” “Funkalicious, Funky Cat” and “Pretty Pink Hearts” may range in style but all feature the color pink.

We have also created a few templates you can use year ’round. Be sure to check out “Fun in the Sun,” “Oceanography” and “Light Green.” And although one of our new templates is named “Halloween Kitty,” the retro-style template can add spunk to your listings any time of year.

Hope you enjoy our new templates! Check them out here.

Our latest release rolled out this morning, and with it came some very helpful features.

Did someone say spell check? Well, it’s back! And we’ve made several other enhancements to make listing easier and help you comply with new eBay policies.

As most sellers know, merchants can no longer offer shipping insurance as an optional fee to their buyers. But that doesn’t mean you have to risk shipping packages without insurance. You can insure items and pay for coverage yourself, or include the cost of insurance in an item’s price or shipping and handling fee.

With eBay’s new policy, it is the seller’s responsibility to make sure items arrive safely to buyers’ hands. This means you will have to decide whether to add insurance, or just drop packages off at the post office and cross your fingers. Our new Auto-Purchase feature for Auctiva Shipping Insurance offers a simple way to insure your packages and give yourself some peace of mind.

When we roll out the second phase of this feature after eBay’s Sept. 22 release, you’ll be able to have your packages automatically insured. Using our Auto-Purchase Rules, you can insure all of your items, no items or only those that reach a minimum value requirement. Auctiva users can set up the rules now, but the rules won’t actually apply until eBay’s new policy takes effect later this month.

Another much-anticipated feature is our new Bulk Listing-Revision Tool. Previously, to edit live eBay listings, users had to leave Auctiva.com and log into eBay. Now you can edit several areas of your live listings right from your Auctiva account. And you can edit 100 listings at a time, which will come in handy if you still need to add handling times or return policies to your Good ‘Til Cancelled listings!

Ever wanted to print out a customizable packing slip—complete with your logo and a text box—to include in your packages? Now you can, and you can add a message to market your Auctiva Commerce Store!

Other improvements include a newly remodeled Auctiva Education site and image thumbnails on the Sales Transactions page.

More improvements are on the way! Stay tuned.