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Reply to "Feature Center - Suggestions and TO DO list"

All,

We haven't done many of the Feature Center requests in 2011, although as Rebecca pointed out we did do the "Delete Related Images When a Listing is Deleted" feature request, which had incidentally received more votes on the Feature request page than any of the others.

However, we have added several major features this year, as well as making several changes changes -- some of which had significant impact--mandated by eBay. All of these have been well publicized by us, with email being sent to our users, messages being posted in users message center, and interstitial pages (these pages that display when you sign on) messaging users about the new feature or the eBay change when those changes required user action to be taken.

I'm not going to list them all off here, but I will mention a few.

* We reached 1800 listing templates on the site, where we had previously been at 1700. We have updated and modernized many many more and we are working on new ones once more.

* We added the ability to purchase shipping labels to the site, and we integrated the tracking numbers gleaned from those labels back to eBay. This was a big feature...the biggest one we have done in at least four years...and took the developers several months to complete. We did a phase II of the labels project and added bulk label printing and support label printers most used by eBay sellers such as Dymo and Zebra. This project was very well publicized and we have a great response from our seller community, with usage increasing each month.

* We added translated pages to our site. Currently the most commonly used pages are available now in German and Chinese as well as English. We continue to roll out more pages that have been translated, and we built the translation capability in such a way that we can readily add other languages such as French or Italian.

* As mandated by eBay, we gradually switched tens of thousands of users from Auctiva Checkout to eBay checkout. This project is now over and done with, but it was very large and complex, and stretched over many months before it was completed.

* In recognition of the growing trend towards social networking as a eCommerce tool, we provided an integration from our active listing pages to Facebook. This originally took the approach of a simple button, but re-visited this issue with a more comprehensive feature called 'Sell It Social' that allows our sellers to automate the process.

* We launched a seller newsletter feature that we had long wanted to provide that allows sellers to opt their buyers in to receive a personalized newsletter that the seller has control over. The concept behind this was to provide sellers with a tool that would help them generate buyer loyalty and return business, while having the messy part of emailing it, keeping track of the mailing list, etc. managed by Auctiva. So far we are seeing good adoption of this feature and some of the sellers are getting very good results with it.

* eBay had two seller releases last year...one in the spring and one in the fall. Each of these required us to make changes in order to keep our sellers up to date. Just to name a few (this is NOT a complete list): a change to return policy, expansion of the listing title length from 55 to 80 characters, error handling for eBay's links policy change, changes to support the Clothing Shoes and Accessories (CSA) mandate, and UPC for certain categories.

With respect to UPC, after we implemented the change in the initial list of categories eBay asked us to provide for they added a number of other ones which required us to revisit this, and we will be making another update for it shortly.

* We also revised the saved listings page (the design of which was very old and out of date) to bring the design more in alignment with the new sales page, introduced with the shipping labels. After receiving user complaints about it (yes this was not one of our finer moments, but...not everyone hated the page...we also had a number of users telling us they really liked the page as we initially released it) we pulled it back and have added additional capabilities and ease of use changes requested mostly by people on the forums. This work is complete and we will be bringing back the new saved listings page in revised form later this month. We believe these revisions will make the saved listings page much more agreeable to those who did not like it before.

The old saved listing page will be kept around for a while along with the new revised saved listing page, but we don't plan on keeping the older version on the site indefinitely.

For 2012, we are still looking at what our product development road map will be. We would like to bring forward some more of the features requested on the Feature Center, but how many of those we will get to remains to be determined.

Meanwhile, it is the new year of 2012 we are alive and well here in Chico California, where contrary to what some have posted elsewhere ALL of our development is done, mostly by the same people who have been doing it for years. And yes, our Support organization is managed by Mike D (who is very very real) located right here in Chico too, and Support is staffed 24x7. We do use an offshore group for night and weekend coverage.

We do appreciate everyone's business and wish everyone a very successful 2012.
Last edited by auctivatonym
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