Okay...How Does Auctiva Make Its Money?

When you pay for Auctiva insurance, they take a small cut of it.

They also have offline listing software (Auctiva Classic) that is a paid service - if you scroll to the bottom of the community boards, you'll see three forums dedicated to their paid products. This is completely separate from the free online service, though.

That's it.

I think this is going to be like Vendio and Paypal. Free while building a business, Paid once the service is established.

Well, I have seen countless people practically beg Auctiva Jeff (the CEO) to start charging for the service (under the assumption that it would ensure Auctiva's long-term success). So far, he has refused...

Our Mr. Poster product has been free for over 4 years. Our Scrolling Gallery has been free for about 7 years. Auctiva has been free for almost a full 2 years now. Internally the name of the project is Freetiva. So we don't even call it Auctiva ourselves. We've never even had a meeting about charging.

Not even I know what I'm going to do half the time, so I'm pretty sure you don't know what my plans are. Lol. These days I don't put much thought into charging. Reading this post and replying is probably more thought than I've put into it in months.

PayPal didn't make it very long at all before charging and I'm pretty sure that had to be their plan from the start. They can't be taking credit cards for 2% without charging. Vendio raised something like $50 million from investors. There can't be a doubt what their plans were. They gave it away free to suck away from products like mine which at the time charged a paltry $29.95 a year. And guess what the people went for it. They left our $29.95 a year product, cheap as dirt, to go there. Only to be charged practically that much per month when they started charging. Lol.

Not to get on your bad side, considering you are the ceo and I love auctiva online, it works so well. But from what I have read ebud and Auctiva Poster have always been plagued with many problems. Auctiva online is more like Vendio, and works so much better. I have to believe that Vendio worked better than ebud and auctiva poster, they also kept track of inventories for sellers that do high volume sales. From my research I have to say back then it was worth it for those sellers to pay 11x more for what they were getting. Vendio charged by the listings or closing costs or something like that don't they? Or am I thinking of another company? Anyway my point is that a program accessed online has many advantages over an installed program! I am glad that I am starting on Ebay now that Auctiva offers a program that works well. And you offer many alternatives that the others do not offer. Meaning the poster, ebud and an online version, and others. I see you have plans to add something that keeps track of inventories, I bet there are many users excited about that. I have had no problems with Auctiva online, other than that you cannot mark a sale as paid unless the buyer went through the auctiva checkout process.
It's like this, noone charges at first! But they do and WILL charge, that is inevitable. It's like free evaluation. It's like a satellite dish, FREE for the first month! Then when you cannot live without it.......... After using Auctiva I don't think I could do without it, I sure hope when you do start charging for this that you make it affordable.

As pointed out, Auctiva does charge for their service - when you buy insurance.