Product Reviews

If, like us, you have a pile of old odds and ends that you promise yourself will one day be put up for auction on eBay, you'll know that the main obstacle is the often arduous task of creating each listing, adding pictures, and jumping through all the other hoops eBay places in your way before the auction goes live.

GarageSale, from I Was Coding, seeks to put an end to the frustration. It's a listing creation and management tool that's as elegant and easy to use as any iLife application, has a host of excellent features, and makes creating and tracking multiple auctions child's play. It has support for eBay's US and UK sites as well as a host of European sites and the eBay Motors US site.

GarageSale's brushed metal interface looks somewhat spartan initially, but once you've spent a few minutes setting up your first template, it opens up access to everything you need to initiate an auction.

Templates are defined, not by look and feel, but by their eBay characteristics. For each template, you set a duration, starting bid, Buy it Now price, reserve price, and shipping and payment options. Thus you could create a template for all the auctions you want to last for five days, or one for items with a starting bid of £1. You can create multiple templates and group new auctions within template folders. Template settings can also be edited manually from within the Templates window.

It's in the Templates window where the real power lies. By giving GarageSale permission to access your eBay account by means of a security token, you allow it to download lists of categories and listing options. Version 1.4 adds the ability to have extra cost listing options, such as bold title, highlighted in red, making them easier to spot.

Creating a listing is

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quick and easy, it's all done in one window, so there's no waiting for a new page to load after you complete each section as you would do if creating the auction on eBay's site. GarageSale supports eBay's Attributes Sets, so you can set options like item conditions and return policy from drop-down menus. The Description box works in the same way as eBay's own Description entry form - you can add HTML tags to your description if you wish. To make this even easier, GarageSale has a couple of neat features. Checking a box below the Description window converts text formatting such as bold, italics, line breaks and paragraphs to HTML and adds the relevant tags. And pressing a notepad button next to the box opens up a mini HTML editor from where you can add tags by selecting them from a drop-down menu. Excellent stuff.

Pictures are a key component of any online auction and GarageSale makes adding them a cinch. You can elect to use eBay's standard method of image handling, by uploading images to its servers, you can host them yourself by telling GarageSale the URL, or you can use your iDisk and let GarageSale pick up the settings from System Preferences. Images can be imported from iPhoto, in which case GarageSale opens a new window that lists your iPhoto albums, imported directly from a digital camera, grabbed from a specified URL or anywhere on your Mac, or even snapped by an iSight if you have one connected - all from within GarageSale. Images can be uploaded in their original form, or scaled down. The only thing missing is support for eBay's layout options, which allows you to choose how pictures relate to the text in an auction listing.

Once you've created your listing, it can be seen in the Preview window, which provides an excellent approximation of how your listing will look when you upload it. Once it's live, the Auction window allows you to track progress.

There's very little to criticise GarageSale for. Yes, it would be great to have access to eBay's layout options, but anyone with a little HTML knowledge can create a layout and add that to the description box. At $24.99 it's a steal. Add considering the fact that you can download a free trial allowing you to upload three auctions, then there's no excuse for putting the contents of your loft onto eBay.

Needs: Mac OS X 10.3 or later + Internet connection + eBay account