GarageSale: eBay Auction Posting App

By Josh Pigford Mar. 11, 2005, 8:00am PT 28 Comments

Let’s be honest here. eBay is highly addictive. I can go months without ever putting anything up for auction but the day I put something up on eBay I immediately want to sell everything I own! Now, maybe I’m a bit of an odd case…but from talking with other people and reading other’s stories, I don’t think I’m the only person who feels this way.

Now, as much as I love eBay, their user interface is a bit overcomplicated for my tastes. There are way to many little forms that you have hit “Next –>” to get through. I feel like by the time I’ve actually posted my item I’ve been through 37 different pages with 800 different, overcomplicated options. That’s where GarageSale comes in.

GarageSale LogoGarageSale is a client application for the eBay online auction system. In layman’s terms…it makes eBay’s complicated interface pretty. Instead of perusing through page after page to post an auction via eBay’s website, you can fill in all your information, add pictures, calculate shipping, and much more…from one page. No “Next–>” buttons or browser crashes in the middle of posting to worry about. The interface and process of posting an auction with this is so simple it’s almost frightening.

GarageSale is divided into 3 main areas which are used to post and follow your auctions.

Templates
The Templates tab is where the meat of the program lies. This is where you fill in all the information for your auction.

GarageSale Template View

From this area you control/edit the following:

  • Title
  • Title attributes (bold and/or highlighted)
  • Subtitle
  • Categories
  • Description and Return Policy
  • Images
  • Auction Options (Duration, starting bid, reserver, shipping, start time, Buy It Now price)
  • Payment Options
  • Site and Location

    • Description & Attributes
    The Description area has Apple’s type editing capabilities built in so you can bold something right away by hitting Command+B or you can hit Command+T to bring up the whole type editing menu. This area also allows you to type straight HTML and then preview it.

    eBay offers many, what they call, item attributes. These are a way to help standardize the listing of certain items such as books, clothings, computers, etc by allowing you specify certain things about your item (year published, size, condition, etc). GarageSale fully supports these attributes and allows you to choose them from this area.

    Images
    GarageSale has a pretty snazzy little feature for controlling images. It allows you to add pictures from a directory on your machine or directly from iPhoto. It then takes care of all the uploading/resizing/etc for you.

    GarageSale iPhoto Import

    Do note that uploading more than one image to eBay’s server costs an extra fee. GarageSale, however, will let you specific your own server to FTP those images to if you do not want to get charged the extra eBay fees.

    Previews
    Want to know exactly what your auction will look like once posted? The Previews tab will let you do just that…preview your auction. Images, formatting, links, etc. are all shown exactly how they will appear on the eBay website. Not much else to say about this, it serves its purpose very well.

    GarageSale Preview

    Auctions
    The Auctions tab lets you monitor your auctions. You don’t even have to go to Ebay’s website to see your auctions. Just startup GarageSale and click the Auctions tab and you’ll be able to follow all your Auctions right there within the program.

    GarageSale Browser

    Delicious Library
    For all of you Delicious Library fans, GarageSale has a feature for importing items from your library and automatically filling in most of the info (description, image, title) for you. For those of you not in the know, Delicious Library is only one of the greatest apps available for Mac.

    Pros
    Super easy interface, great features for quickly posting multiple items, and just all around useful features.

    Cons
    As with most apps, there are a few things I think iwascoding could improve on. My main gripe is the fact that the various additional costs for adding extras to your auction (bold title, second category, etc) are not displayed in the program. This means you have to go to the eBay site and check out all the fees there which is a bit inconvenient.

    Overall this is a fantastic program. It’s incredibly straight forward which is exactly what it should be. It takes eBay’s overcomplicated setup and throws it into one single page. I’ll most certainly be using this post all my eBay auctions from now on.

    GarageSale is a product of iwascoding.com and is available for $24.99 for a single user license or $44.99 for a family license allowing you to install it on up to 5 computers. You can purchase it here.

    (If you get a little bored, you can check out the 5 most recent eBay items posted with GarageSale)

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