AUCTIVA new gross value fees
Summary: alwaysthebest4u expressed concern over a fee increase with their image hosting service, AUCTIVA, which now charges 1% of gross sales, prompting them to consider alternatives. Participants suggested storing photos on personal devices or using web hosting services to avoid relying on third-party platforms. Discussions included the pros and cons of retaining images, organization methods, and efficiency in listing on eBay. ten_o_nine highlighted potential issues if AUCTIVA subscriptions are canceled, emphasizing the need for careful transition to avoid listing disruptions.
Longtime seller of about 800 collectible items a year
Have always used AUCTIVA for image hosting and templates to create listings
Today got some BS email about how they were raising prices slightly to accommodate their Amazon and Walmart additions
WHAT THEY DIDN'T MENTION is they’re now going to charge 1% of your monthly gross sales !
That’s before ebay fees and shipping is reduced out!
Since I don’t feel like paying $1500 yearly now to them for my work,
What alternatives are there that include that image hosting?
fern*wood
·3 weeks agoI used to use SellerSourceBook because I thought I needed those cutesy borders--what a waste of money. I also recall several times where my photos stored with them disappeared or showed wrong photos altogether.
I went to posting entirely on ebay and don't save my photos after making my listings--so much easier and cheaper.
onefootflipper
·3 weeks agoWhat purpose is served by storing your old item photos after they are posted? How is that useful?
ten_o_nine
·3 weeks agoI take my photos, edit them, upload them directly to the eBay listing, and then delete them from my PC and empty my recycle bin. I have never had an issue.
The poster has a little over 400 items and sold 62 items in 90 days, so no need for a third-party platform like Auctiva , it's just a waste of money.
The trick here is if they cancel the Auctiva subscription, every single image hosted on Auctiva’s servers will break and disappear from their live eBay listings within a few days. Their 400 active listings will turn into broken camera icons, and their custom templates will fail to load.
They can keep Auctiva active for one or 2 more billing cycles, but stop using it for new listings. Every new item they list from today onward should be done on eBay. for the remaining items, re-upload the missing photos directly to eBay, they can bulk-select their items and strip out Auctiva's HTML description template and clean up the text in just a few clicks.
alwaysthebest4u
OP3 weeks agoSo if I upload photos to ebay listing and delete from my iPad , they stay on eBay listing?
ten_o_nine
·3 weeks agoYes. eBay has no access to your IPad.
alwaysthebest4u
OP3 weeks agoYes I know that, was spooked if I deleted pic from AUCTIVA, it disappeared from ebay listing
ten_o_nine
·3 weeks agoThat's how they trick you, just do it gradually, it seems you've been with them for years, so a year would sound reasonable to break away, all new listings should be listed on eBay and work on the old ones by copying images and cleaning HTML.
Images are not hard to recreate once you have them online.
ten_o_nine
·3 weeks agoSome of my listings have pictures that were deleted from my PC years ago
alwaysthebest4u
OP3 weeks agoI’m up to 800, any way to migrate them over as I don’t have the original pictures anymore?
fm2000
·3 weeks agoI keep my photos indefinitely. Since I copy the photos from a phone to my computer, I just leave them on the computer. Handy if eBay has a glitch and they disappear, and for possible manual crosslisting. I have many terabytes of cheap storage, keeping them costs virtually nothing. I only wish I could keep my entire listings without paying some third party for a subscription, why this import/export isn't built into eBay's system is beyond me.
mam98031
·3 weeks agoWay back when they took away the Turbolister because it was built on old technology that wasn't going to be supported anymore, I went to creating Templates in Ebay. I created one for each category I sell in and each subsection of stuff I sell.
All my TOS [terms of sale] remain the same on all listings, so I built that into all the templates plus I filled in all the ISBs [item specific boxes] I could and I created ones I would need regularly in each template. It has served me well over the years since Turbolister and it saves me a great deal of time.
https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/selling-tools/selling-templates?id=4097
The link below is for international sites, the above is for the US site. I find that the pics in the link below can be very helpful in understanding how to use and create these templates.
https://export.ebay.com/en/first-steps/manage-listings/selling-templates/
Now just some suggestions that make things MUCH easier on sellers. Remove some of that stuff you have in all your listings that is a repeat of specific fields that Ebay has allowed us for quite a few years now. Return policy, shipping stuff, payment, handling time, etc. No need to repeat that stuff and besides, if you need to edit it, instead of having to change every single listing you have, you can use the bulk editor and just update the field.
Use your ISBs more. When a buyer searches for something, the search engine doesn't just look at titles, it looks at the ISBs too.
In your description, I would also recommend to tell the size of what you are selling when applicable. Like on the candy molds you have, you don't say what they measure. That may be important to some. Especially for those just getting into collecting certain things.
Good Luck! I hope this helps!
kensgiftshop
·3 weeks agoI You can get your own web hosting to store your photos.
mam98031
·3 weeks agoJust speaking for myself. I store all my photos on my desktop. Various folders so they are easier to find by subject or type or both.
kensgiftshop
·3 weeks agoSame here and I also upload them to my web site, in case my PC decides to die.
mam98031
·3 weeks agoI'm very fortunate. My husband is a tech guy. He builds my computers himself and maintains them. So if mine goes down, I am almost always his top priority. LOL
alwaysthebest4u
OP3 weeks agoI have iPad and my storage gets full
mam98031
·3 weeks ago@alwaysthebest4u you can always back them up to a thumb drive from your tablet.
onefootflipper
·3 weeks agoWhy are you storing the old photos in the first place? I delete them the second I upload them. How are they useful later?
kensgiftshop
·3 weeks agoFor one, listings on Ebay seem to disappear sometimes.
If something comes up later and the listing no longer shows on Ebay, I'll have them to look back on.
A few years ago, I found an item that I remembered seeing somewhere before, but couldn't find anything on Google about it.
Looked through my old photos and there it was, and I sold one a few years before.
Thanks to the old photos and descriptions I keep a copy of, I knew what t was.
onefootflipper
·3 weeks agoAh, seems like it would be a lot faster just to take new photos than for me to dig through a archive of hundreds of thousands of photos looking for the old ones.
kensgiftshop
·3 weeks agoNew photos wouldn't be a problem.
Trying to figure out what it was, was the problem.
With the old photos, I was able to find out what the item was with my old descriptions.
fm2000
·3 weeks agoIf you put the photos in a folder with the same name as an item title, finding them is no sweat. Only takes a second to copy/paste the item title into a folder name and paste the photos in the folder.
onefootflipper
·3 weeks agoThat is a labor sink that would never pay off for me. 20 folders to name and sort per day, every day, for years. Even if it somehow only took 5 minutes per day that is still over 30 labor hours per year. I don't let myself do anything in my business that isn't capable of contributing $20 an hour. There is no way saving my photos would be worth $600 worth of labor per year.
chapeau-noir
·3 weeks agoThey're also handy if you're a seasonal seller, as I am.
alwaysthebest4u
OP3 weeks agoI read that as sensational seller lol
onefootflipper
·3 weeks ago · EditedI literally spend most of my time researching ebay and making videos about it and I can't comprehend what you would ever need auctiva for in the first place.
No one needs ebay image hosting anymore. The sites have all directly done that for something like 20 years now. If you want something to make your listings or store your old ones together for some reason then you would be much better served by either crosslist if multichannel is your thing. https://crosslist.com/?via=foot
Or if making your listings and storing the old ones is your main thing then you probably want flowlister. https://flowlister.com/login/?ref=ONEFOOT
Because of my youtube channel I have free unlimited plans with a dozen different software packages related to ebay, and those are the only ones I actually use, and I use them both constantly.
alwaysthebest4u
OP3 weeks agoSo excuse my ignorance, if I upload photos to ebay and use their listings and delete them from my iPad, they will stay on the site?
ten_o_nine
·3 weeks ago · EditedYes. eBay has no access to your IPad.
stephenmorgan
·3 weeks agoPictures will stay on eBay until something happens to delete them such as after a length of time after being sold or listing is ended.
Is you iPad not capable of storing all your pictures?
I do not try to list everything I have for sale at once so having the pictures stored on my computer is very useful when I decide to list a few items.
I have stored on my computer 31,888 pictures consisting of 8000 toys and they only take up 63.5 gb of space. This is miniscule space in todays computers. I have everything organized where it is easily searchable. The information is also automatically backed up to the Cloud where I can access it from almost any computer with a internet connection.
To keep everything stored in the Cloud I can have up to 6tb of data but realistically I will never have more than 1tb. My last purchase of this capability was for 5 years at $50 a year.
onefootflipper
·3 weeks agoJust wondering, how often do you return to that old picture well?
stephenmorgan
·3 weeks agoI return to it often for various reasons.
As I am not trying to list everything at once, I will return to the "old picture well" any time I choose to list something for sale. If I wish to list 100 items the pictures are already taken and I can bulk list them fairly quickly.
I do not have thousands of pictures dumped into one file. My pictures are in a very well organized searchable file structure. I have near 400 boxes of toys and the file structure is set up to where I know exactly what is in each individual box.
onefootflipper
·3 weeks agoAh, I make listings and store them unposted, but I delete the photos as soon as I do it. You are doing something different.