isale review lacks depth

Submitted by gregrow on Tue, 2008-08-12 11:57

I was surprised and a little shocked at this review of iSale. As a former user of iSale, and a present user of another eBay auction tool, GarageSale, I was hoping that there would be some comparison between these two similar products, but no. The single screen shot in the review shows the software with only the tutorial auctions, which makes me wonder if it was actually used. In fact, the review reads at times like the list of features that pops up at startup. That alone makes me wonder what sort of testing really happened on this software, and by extension what value the ‘editors choice’ award has. Is there a review panel for these choices, or is it just based on what things look like? Doesn’t the use of the word “choice” infer that there was some comparison between things being made? I would agree that iSale’s templates are very slick, and they are one of the reasons that I first purchased the program. But in use they felt like they were overshadowing the item for sale. Or to say it another way, they looked better/fancier/cooler than the auction item, and that made for an odd looking listing. My experience with the research assistant was that it was only helpful in auctions of certain product types, which seems to include electronics. While I’m unclear what is the full extent of what products it works for and what it doesn’t, I know that for designer items such as purses and jewelry, it was less help than a good search of eBay and Google. Also taking that research and getting it into a listing was confusing, and in the end I stopped trying to make it work. After creating about 15 auctions with iSale right after a version upgrade, I forwarded to them a list of items that jumped out at me about the program, both problems and usage issues, and in the next couple of updates I don’t think that a single thing I mentioned was changed. But the feature list continued to grow. Grrrr. In regard to the other features listed in the review, I believe that both programs have them. While I don’t find GarageSale to be wildly better than iSale, what it has going for it includes: an interface that is more intuitive to me, text editing features that are straightforward and don’t make you fearful of what might happen, the templates are simpler looking and so seem to fit the items better, the layout options for pictures are head and shoulders above iSale (place pictures in like a dozen different presets, including a ‘hover’ trick that is pretty sweet), the shipping calculator set up is better, you can print out the entire preview view, and the program seems to get along with eBay better. I have not used the post auction features in either application, like shipping and feedback, since they appear to not make things easier than just using eBay. Neither program will allow you to avoid the use of the eBay site, which is probably a good thing, since it’s important for sellers to stay in touch with the ever-changing eBay world. eBay has over time made creating a listing easier, but these type of programs certainly do a better job, since they come with templates and other features. But I look for things to make listings not only better looking, but faster to create, faster to edit and re-use, and do things that I expect, and not make things harder.

Login or register to post comments