eBay Turbo Lister 2

For many people, Ebay is a magical place where they can buy the latest gear for the cheapest price imaginable. For others, it is a tedious painful experience where listing an item takes page after page of web crawling and listing 15 items takes the better part of 2 hours. Thankfully, Ebay feels our pain and understands that there needs to be a better solution.

This is where Turbo Lister comes into play. Turbo Lister is a program created by Ebay that is free to download and specifically targeted at bulk users. While the average person listing one or two items a month can still use it, the real benefits are seen when posting bulk items in one sitting.

We have been using Turbo Lister since the very first version and up until now it has been useful but not terribly well made. Turbo Lister 2 however, is not only easy to use with some nifty new functionality, but it's also rather attractive to boot. A Macintosh software sensibility has seemed to seep into the software industry of late and Turbo Lister 2 is no exception. With a muted gray colour scheme and Mac-like window edges, there is no denying its appeal.

Downloading the software won't cost you a cent and the application is available from the Ebay website. Once installed, the program asks you for your Ebay login details which it then uses to get the rest of your personal information, including your selling preferences and bank account details.

Listings are added to your database one at a time and via one screen. This is one of the biggest differences from the older versions of Turbo Lister. Using only one screen (albeit via scrolling) makes it simple to add a listing as everything you need to enter is right in front of you. Choosing a category for your item is done by choosing from the drop down taxonomy tree. After this, all the details are entered and the product is saved. At this point you can also save the product as a template to save you time when adding similar items later on.

Once you have all your products in your database, the ones you want to upload to Ebay are moved into a separate upload area and then the cost of the listing is calculated. If you are happy with the cost one more click has them uploaded to Ebay and commenced as active auctions. This is also the point where the program looks for updates to the Ebay categories ,although we found it odd that it did so after the upload was complete and not before. As annoying as it was in previous versions, searching for category changes before you uploaded something made sense. In our tests, our auctions sometimes went up in incorrect categories because since the software release, Ebay has changed their taxonomy structure.

The newest element that has been added to the program is the ability to edit the spreadsheet view of your collection. This comes in handy to make last minute corrections or adjust prices or auction periods. This feature alone is a major improvement of the software and one people have been eagerly awaiting.

If you post multiple items on Ebay at once, there is no better tool available for doing so.