Inkfrog 2.0 is Helping me Cope with eBay’s Massive Coming Changes

If you find yourself scrambling to update your eBay listings so they’re ready for the site on September 16, then you may want to take a look at Inkfrog as an auction management tool. And if you’re already an Inkfrog customer who figures that eBay’s hitting you with enough changes already, no need for you to stray from classic Inkfrog 1.0, then I can tell you, you’re wrong, check out 2.0.

I’ve been using Inkfrog for a couple of years now and to be honest I’ve always underutilized them, until now at least. I came to them by accident. I started using Inkfrog because eBay retired TurboLister support for Windows 98 users (and then, of course, weren’t ready for Vista users when I upgraded), but I was ready to stay after I saw my first day of listings pay for itself. Up until now the only function I’ve used with Inkfrog was their auction launcher and it paid for itself because you could schedule listings to space themselves apart by a couple of minutes at launch.

I didn’t use their templates, I keep my images on my own web site, my Inkfrog listings were simply vanilla html with their little frog logo at the bottom of the page.

When eBay announced their changes I decided to shop for a new listing tool. Most of my research, which I seem to conduct every year or two, didn’t get past the phase of reading reviews. I tested ChannelAdvisor’s MarketplaceAdvisor for about an hour, but I really didn’t see much of an advantage over what I was getting for my $9.95/month with Inkfrog. But I still decided that MarketplaceAdvisor was likely my best bet…depending upon what happened when I clicked that mystery button for Inkfrog 2.0.

I logged into old Inkfrog to see this:

And then clicked that Inkfrog 2.0 link at the top of the page to log into this:

The new Inkfrog not only hosted the eBay listings that I prepared inside Inkfrog, it also is a portal to live eBay listings. Beyond ending listings or sending Store items to Fixed Price, Inkfrog 2.0 gives you the ability to edit live eBay listings. Granted, you can’t edit live eBay listings in bulk…but a little note pops up which says that feature is coming soon.

Then I saw they had another new feature called Globals. The Globals section consists of six separate elements of an eBay listing, which you can prepare in advance and then apply to listings in bulk. Well, you can’t apply in bulk to live listings (yet), but you can use the bulk Globals features on inactive items that you are editing within your Inkfrog library. The six Global elements are the following:

• Shipping options
• Payment options
• Return Policy
• Shipping Terms
• Payment Terms
• Sales Tax

And you can have multiple options for each of those six elements. For example my movie items start out with a Flat $2.00 First Class fee, while heavier magazines start with a Calculated Priority Fee. I just create two options inside the Shipping Options Global and apply to appropriate listings.

One other hitch was that in order to use Globals you had to use one of their templates. They have a few hundred and as I expected I found something I liked. Since eBay’s policy changes are forcing me to change all of my listings anyway, why not try this out? In fact, I figure it may save me work for my next round of listings.

Currently I’m including the option for accepting Checks and Money Orders in my Payment Options Global. My hope is that once paper payments are banned I’ll be able to go in and edit live listings (hopefully in bulk) to include a new PayPal Only Global.

Since the bulk options aren’t enabled for live listings quite yet*, I’ve been ending listings, importing them into my inkfrog library, inserting a template and applying each of my new Globals to each listing, and then going inside each listing to chop out the extra/repetitive text. It’s going a lot quicker than any other method I could have thought of for editing 2,600 eBay listings.

*I should also mention that Inkfrog 2.0 has yet to enable several of the simpler bulk edit function for library listings. The saving grace is that these functions already exist in Inkfrog 1.0 and it’s pretty simple to switch between the two sites if you need any of these functions. I’ve been keeping both 1.0 and 2.0 open in separate tabs inside the same window. Works fine.

For example, I have found it’s easier to apply the templates in Inkfrog 1.0 first and then logging into 2.0 to apply Globals, as bulk edit of templates is one feature not yet enabled in 2.0. Thus, I apply the templates in 1.0 where I can use this particular bulk edit function. Piece of cake really.

These links won’t stay live forever, but for now, here’s an example of one of my old eBay listings, and here’s what one of my new Inkfrog 2.0 listings look like.

No matter how you cut it, this transitional period at eBay is going to hit us all with a heap of work. You need to have a tool, and at $9.95 per month (that’s it, no percentage on listing fees, just $9.95) I think I can safely recommend Inkfrog as a tool for even the smallest sellers.

Some other quick Inkfrog 2.0 tips, tricks and notes:
If you host your own images like I do, you can now set your gallery images inside the 2.0 templates. In 1.0 I couldn’t do this and after launch I’d have to go to eBay and manually add my Gallery URLs to listings.

If you do host your own images, just leave the photo area of the template blank (do include the Gallery image though). Then the template closes up like my examples above does.

I always recommend hosting your own images because if you shop around for auction management tools like I do it can be a real pain to have thousands of images stored with a site that you want to leave. I learned this lesson the hard way when I left the old Auctionworks/Marketworks platform after it became too complicated for me to use. I kept 8,000 listings on eBay then and Marketworks had them all! What a pain!

Check your Item Specifications closely. I don’t think this is Inkfrog’s fault, as this feature is very funky on eBay itself, but just make sure they say what you want them to say.

I think eBay’s thrown us a recent curveball in the Returns area of item listings. There’s now a dropdown menu in the Returns area, which I don’t recall seeing before, declaring who pays return postage. This choice isn’t included in Inkfrog yet, and I have a feeling it’s being overlooked quite a bit. Unfortunately, for me, it seems to default to “Buyer pays return shipping” at launch, which for me is not the case. Hopefully Inkfrog, or even eBay gives us a tool to handle this in bulk soon.

At the bottom of the Inkfrog 2.0 it defaults to including a new Gallery feature. Kind of like the Vendio showcases. Personally, I don’t like it (yet) because it selects from all of your listings randomly. I opt out of this for now, though would use it if I were allowed to set up a Global for it to narrow specific showcases down to specific item categories.

A key thing to remember in Inkfrog 2.0 is that you cannot currently move Live (or Live Ended) eBay listings to your Inkfrog Library. I had been going along opening each individual ended listing and “saving to library.” Found a quicker way today–you can download listings into a CSV file from inside Turbo Lister and than upload the file to your Inkfrog library. Works great.

I anticipate a lot of the little problems I mention in Inkfrog 2.0 to be corrected soon. Why? Because for each of the functions I say you can’t do, there is a very similar action you can do. It also helps that there are a lot of little pop-ups saying that a feature is coming soon! I really hope Inkfrog keeps its dirt cheap $9.95 flat per month price, but this thing is so loaded that all I can do is hope. On the bright side, I have not seen any rumors of increases anywhere yet, so hopefully it stays that way!