Auctiva, one of the main image hosting and auction template services, has announced that their services will no longer be free, beginning in July. Unfortunately, this change may affect your bottom line if you have been using Auctiva's free plan. The new pricing structure is a bit confusing, to say the least.
Seller Sourcebook is stepping up to the plate to help Auctiva customers. In a letter to Auctiva customers on the SSB site, founder and CEO Kristen Rice writes,
"SSB has been and remains a flat fee service with no listing fees, insertion fees or transaction fees. To help ease the financial transition from a free service to a flat fee service we are offering a 10% discount on our subscription rates to former Auctiva Members. Please contact our support staff who will be happy to provide a coupon code you may use at the time of your sign-up."
As a current SSB customer and partner, I am thrilled to see SSB making this generous offer. SSB has also developed an Auctiva integration tool to "import your actual listings and to convert (Revise) them at eBay to contain URLs to SSB instead of Auctiva. This way you won't have to recreate them. We estimate this function will be available within several days. We are also planning to give the ability to Relist your items."
I have been a SSB customer for years and cannot rave enough about their exceptional customer service, huge template selection, and their user friendly site. If you are an Auctiva customer looking for an auction template or image hosting service, I absolutely recommed SSB. They will more than meet your needs, they will exceed your expectations. Click here to get started with SSB and find out what you have been missing.
Thanks for posting about this, Suzanne. The Auctiva membership community has been offended and outraged at the new pricing structures which will take effect 7/1/09 ~ After much contemplation, SSB does remain a very viable alternative which has consistently shown FABULOUS support services and competive pricing (Auctiva's pricing structure is NO WHERE NEAR competitive for higher volume sellers). Curiously enough, what perhaps few of your readers may know, is that if you'd really like to stay with Auctiva there is ONE MORE OPTION available to you. Here's their dirty little secret: If you go to "Cancel" your account from the My Account tab, when you first click "cancel" another screen pops up offering you to stay for $10 flat/month Plus $5 image hosting fee per month, locked in for 18 months. You can cancel at any time. You will need your credit card information available to submit to them at the time you accept this rate. They won't tell you about it or otherwise publicize it and after 5 emails to their support (they continued to deny the availability of this option), I tried it and IT WORKS. I will be switching to SSB but need time to do so ~ this option buys me another 18 months of time, not less than 30 days :) Just wanted to share Auctiva's dirty little secret
ReplyDeleteSandyK
I LOVE SellerSourcebook. They have templates for everything AND they are very reasonably priced. Also, they will never raise their rate from the rate you start with!
ReplyDeletehow much do u pay per month? I just got back to ebay after a 2 mn vacation. I had no idea what auctiva is planning to do.
ReplyDeleteHi, Samantha. I pay $8 a month. It is worth every penny!
ReplyDeleteI am a now EX auctiva user.
ReplyDeleteLike a great number of people I got sick of all the lies and misrepresentations.
I also got very tired of the so called customer support not being able to read nor comprehend English.
Auctiva's word processor doesnt work.
Auctiva's hit counter doesnt work.
Auctiva's bulk pic loader doesnt work.
Ect, ect ect ect to quote the famous movie star.
OHH.. dont bother posting a detailed T R U E F U L posting of the bs at activa in their overloaded complaint forums either !!
MY experience in doing so generated this message from them :
"Account Suspended: Your account has been suspended."
Their CEO doesnt even have the professionism to address a long list of auctiva unattended complaints.
Their billing is the only thing that seems to work >> immediately.
shaniko86