The auction management service is a great invention. I can’t say too many times that you cannot achieve cost-effectiveness in your eBay retail business without the use of an auction management service. Whether you use eBay’s auction management service or a third-party vendor’s auction management service is not important. What’s important is that you use some service to keep track of your eBay auctions and sales or else you will not be able to provide first-rate customer service and will likely go insane trying to hold your business together.

What is an auction management service? It can be software that you subscribe to, is delivered via the Web, and that you use through your Web browser. Or, it can be software that you load and use on your computer like any other program. Usually, it’s a combination of the two.

Some software vendors deliver more of their service via the Web and some deliver more of their service via programs resident on your computer.

Here are a list of things that an auction management service can do for you:

1. Inventory control
2. Presentation (templates) Auction listings management Customer communication
3. Auction follow-up Checkout
4. Shipping
5. Transaction and fulfillment documentation Feedback management
6. Sales Reporting
7. Accounting dovetail Catalog
8. Datafeed

To do these things responsibly and effectively without an auction management service would take several employees. The cost of this type of service is low. It’s extremely low when compared to having employees or independent contactors do it manually.

That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t require your time and effort or the time and effort of your employees to make it work. It just means that it cuts down considerably on the personnel requirement for getting the job done well. See eBay Business the Smart Way Second Edition for more about auction management services.

Datafeed Devices

Now and in the future one of the things you will want to look for in auction management services is the capability to do a custom datafeed. This requires two capabilities. First, you must be able to create extra columns (fields) to add new information to your database. The next datafeed marketplace in which you want to sell may require information (about products) that you’ve never entered into your database before. Second, you have to be able to assemble whatever columns you need to into a data set and export the data in such columns. When you export data, you are sending a datafeed. It is the sending of this datafeed which is the essence of datafeed marketing.

Datafeed marking caught on big time among auto dealers selling vehicles online in 2003-2004. The software designed for auto dealers to sell online contains the capability of providing datafeeds to various websites. There’s even one service that offers to make datafeeds for datafeed marketplaces it does not yet serve. I don’t see this capability available right now in most auction management services. But it does exist, and it will be widespread soon.

Here are a few of the auction management services offering datafeeds now (based on an incomplete survey at the eBay Live conference 2004):

Andale, http://andale.com

ChannelAdvisor Merchant, http://www.channeladvisor.com

Infopia, http://infopia.com

StoreFront, http://storefront.com (through a third-party add-on)

Truition, http://truition.com

Yukon Soft, http://yukonsoft.com

Zoovy, http://zoovy.com

As datafeeds are not considered serious selling features yet, it’s difficult to obtain accurate information about what specific services are actually offered. Then too, the auction-management-service marketplace is changing so fast that information in books about software features is not likely to be up-to-date for long.

What Are They Doing Now?

Today many auction management services for eBay and eBay Stores claim to do a datafeed to Froogle. eBay Stores makes the same claim. That’s primarily because Froogle is free. They can’t automatically do a datafeed to Yahoo Shopping without your permission, because that would cost you money—unless they made their own special arrangements.

The question you have to ask is, How do they do that datafeed without its being set up properly? To make a long story short, it may require an extra column (field) to do it right. There are other ways to do it effectively. But the person who does the eBay ad has to be involved in the overall process, it seems to me, in order for the content to be exported into Froogle rationally and effectively.

Datafeed capability is a process that is just beginning to be explored and established for eBay retailing. If the capability in your auction management service does not come quickly enough for you, squeal about it. It will come faster. The auction management service vendors not only need to provide this capability, but they need to provide it in a way that makes it easy and convenient for you to use it. You are the one that has to go out and find the appropriate and relevant datafeed marketplaces for your products. When you find them, it should be very easy to send the required datafeed.

Cost-Effectiveness Review

There are some eBay retail businesses that sell only a few products and nevertheless are profitable, even lucrative. For instance, if you are selling used airplanes at a minimum price of $165,000 each, you don’t have to make very many sales each year to have a reasonable business. Your inventory may never exceed a three or four airplanes at a time. Your sales may not exceed one or two airplanes a month. And certainly you can keep track of such a sales program on paper without using any software.