I think Auctiva had the potential to be a fantastic alternative to listing directly with EBay. The ability to host and post additional pics without paying the additional per/pic charge was and is very attractive. However, the bugs within Auctiva makes it unreliable and extremely frustrating to use for creating and posting my listings. I still use Auctiva for image hosting and I like the templates but I use Turbo Lister 2 to create and post listings. I upload my images to Auctiva and simply cut and paste the image url into Turbo Lister.
It's not the best of all worlds by any stretch as Turbo Lister is not without it's faults. It will crash occasionally as well, but not nearly as often as Auctiva and with Turbo Lister being a stand-alone software that actually resides on your computer, you don't run into the timing out issue that Auctiva seems to be famous for.
I've looked at a couple of other options, one of which was kAuctions. But the software crashed the second time I used it. Initially the designer was helpful, but when the software crashed, I emailed him TWICE and still have not received a reply.
There are many out there, but I've not had the time nor the patience to deal with them. If you do a search on EBay for auction software you'll see there are quite a few.
If anyone else has used other software and found it to be the answer to the novice user, I'd appreciate the direction.
Thanks,
Lillian