Anybody else catch that?

So I was already considering paying for a service when Auctiva announced their pricing plan. When I saw what it would cost me monthly, the way they told everyone and the short period of time they gave us to decide, I was not only outraged, I ran for the hills as fast I could. I felt their service was not worth the pricing they were now asking.

If they had come out with the $9.95 price plan at first, I may have been tempted, but I think I still would have tried out other services to see if they were better.

I’ve moved, glad I did and won’t be returning to Auctiva even if it was free again. I’m very happy with Inkfrog and glad Auctiva pushed me into the change.

And making new listings is pretty easy, and in some ways easier than Auctiva. I like the ability to manage my two eBay accounts from one InkFrog account. I like being able to get insurance from them without using a separate checkout system (that buyers generally hate), and making and posting new listings is easy.

I will add one caveat, I didn’t care for the templates InkFrog had (although I’ve heard they’re hard at work on new ones), so I purchased a custom template from an eBay seller that I like a lot, for not very much money.

All in all the move to InkFrog has been pretty painless, and the only fly in the ointment is having to pay Auctiva for a few months while I revise my store listings that still have their templates. Don’t hesitate if you’re thinking of switching, it’s well worth it.

1) When I first considered using Auctiva, and I asked Jeff how it could be free, he said they made money by offering insurance.

2) At the end of May Auctiva announces new fees. As part of the eruption that occurred as a result, it comes out that the way Auctiva actually made most of their money was that they were getting funding from eBay, which had never been mentioned by them previously.

3) Auctiva’s first payment plans were incredibly expensive. Auctiva said they had 100 employees, apparently far more than their competitiors had (didn’t they say something about Inkfrog being run “out of a garage”?), and therefore had much higher operating costs. They apparently estimated that 80% of their customers would stay with them. So, you have to assume that they were basing what they were planning on charging times the number of customers they expected to have to equal what they felt they needed to replace eBay’s affiliate fees and stay in business.

4) At the sign of a mass exodus, Auctiva starts doing some strange things to apparently stop the hemorrhaging. One thing they do is offer a $10 a month plan, but only if you pay all at once for 18 months. One very bizzare thing they did was, if someone went to close their account, a $10 a month offer would pop up in front of the account closer. Auctiva would deny this offer publicly and remove any mention of it from their message boards.

5) Finally, Auctiva Jeff makes a public apology and offers a $9.95 a month plan for everyone. By this time, however, many people have already jumped into the willing and waiting arms of Auctiva’s competitiors, or are so irate at what has occurred that they are leaving regardless.

A number of things can be surmised from all of this, but the one that stands out in my mind is that it is highly doubtful Auctiva can survive financially, at least in its current form. They have lost a lot of customers and no longer are being paid by eBay’s affiliate program. I don’t know how their finances are, but based on what has occurred in the last few weeks, it is obvious that *they* at least didn’t feel they could survive on $9.95 a month per customer, or they more than likely would have offered that to begin with. And that was when they expected to *have* a lot more customers. than it looks like they now do.

My prediction is that they will be downsizing, and with that will be technical support and customer service issues. Unfortunately for them, from the customer viewpoint, they are now paying for something they used to get for free, so they will expect better, not worse, service. If you look at their message boards for the last couple of days, this seems to be exactly what is happening.

I personally feel it is very risky to be investing thousands of hours of time building listings in their software and loading images onto their servers. I’m not going to say they are intentionally dishonest, but I will say they appear to be very unstable. It won’t be the first time a listing service pulled the plug (I’m a SpareDollar survivor) when they decided they simply couldn’t afford to operate.

Still, there’s a value to what the third party listers provide. Just not sure which one, if any, is for me. I tried Vendio awhile back in hopes that i could manage Amazon and eBay simultaneously but I wasn’t ready for the Amazon level required, i am too casual on Amazon still. So i will give Vendio a second look and Inkfrog a good try as well, before I decide what to do.