It can get a little overwhelming, you mind races from one task to another and nothing gets accomplished. There always seems to be something else you need to do for your online auction business, but you certainly can't hire a staff and you probably can't afford some of the auction automation software, let alone understand it. But there are free solutions to help with some of the details, like getting your auctions listed. You don't have to spend all your hard earned profits to make your auction business manageable.



As you may have already heard, eBay offers its own listing tool, and it's free. What you might not already understand is just how powerful a tool it really is. Turbo Charger sits on your own desktop and allows you to build auction listings within one easy to use graphic interface. You can even add one of eBay's auction templates to your listing, but there is a small fee. Even without using layouts, you still have some control over how your listing will look, and you can purchase or make your own template and use it in Turbo Charger without incurring any additional expenses.

Another free listing tool, but one which resides online, comes from the services offered by Auctiva. In the same way as Turbo Charger, you can build your auction listings with an easy to use tool. You can add any of Auctiva's templates absolutely free of charge, and even better you won't have to pay to have your graphics or photos hosted. One of the most useful tools Auctiva provides (for free also) is a scrolling gallery. The gallery will show photos, titles and prices of all your auctions in a window at the bottom or top of your listings; you have control over where the gallery is shown, and can integrate it into your template if you choose.

Both of the tools I've described offer the advantage of preparing a large number of listings then uploading them all to eBay at the same time. If you are looking to streamline your business, you could start all your new auctions on the same day each week but feed listings into a listing tool on the other days. By implementing a system such as this, you could for example do all your photographs on one day, write descriptions on another. You could narrow down the days to handle shipping, since all of your auctions would be ending on the same day. It would just be a matter of waiting for payments to come through.

So don't despair, there is hope for managing your unruly auction business. Spending a little time now, learning to use a free tool, will save you hours and hours of time down the road.