In the highly competitive world of free scrolling gallery widgets for the bottom of your eBay listings, I had earlier expressed my preference for Seller Circle. They used to offer several slick choices all of which were free and you didn’t even need to sign up for their site to use them. You can read my original post about them here.

However, a few months ago, when eBay redesigned the listing pages, their galleries no longer worked. They would open the new items in a frame only causing this endless frame within a frame within a frame disaster so I ditched them, hoping they would fix the galleries up soon.

But they just sent out this email today:

Dear Seller Circle members,

Wow, I can’t believe that after all this time, this is the first time that Mike and I are sending an email to all of our users. We have a couple big updates that we wanted to tell you about.

1. We’re replacing the Floating Gallery with a new gallery. The main reason, as many of you have noticed, is that the Floating Gallery no longer floats! Because of the way that eBay restyled and re-engineered their listing pages, we’re no longer able to float the gallery at the bottom of your buyers’ web browsers. The floating gallery was designed to be very small, because its placement made it highly visible. Because it can no longer float, it’s no longer a very compelling design for an eBay gallery. The new gallery is big, your items’ images look gorgeous, it spins, it zooms… it’s really, really cool! Mike and I are extremely happy with it and we hope that you will be too.

2. We’re phasing out the free (formerly floating) gallery in favor of the new gallery, which will cost a low subscription fee of $2.99/month with a 7 day free trial so you can all see how it performs in your listings. The subscriptions are easily managed through PayPal and can be cancelled anytime. Previously, we relied on eBay’s Affiliate Program to offset our costs, but we made a mistake in how we tracked referrals and our participation in the Affiliate Program was discontinued. Mike and I REALLY wish that we could continue to make the best free tools for the eBay community, but we’re just unable to any longer. I should point out that we don’t have billing information or PayPal relationships set up with any of our users, so don’t worry – we won’t (and can’t) automatically bill you unless you choose to use the new gallery.

You can see the new gallery at the all-new Seller Circle website (http://www.sellercircle.com) and you can start your free trial by just signing in and clicking the link that you’ll see at the top of the page. The former gallery will continue to work as usual until the end of February.

Thank you so much for being a part of the Seller Circle community. We hope that you’ll find that the new gallery really helps to boost your sales!

-Christian Williams
co-founder of Seller Circle

$3 a month for a gallery that everyone else offers for free?

I will say this, though. The new gallery is very very slick (you can see it here) but if all I’m getting for $3 a month is that, I’m not interested.

What do you think?