As someone who buys coins on Ebay, I don't get the allure of Auctiva, Photobucket, etc. In my opinion they actually hurt sellers. There's no real close up and I can't see your coins properly. Plus you force me to open a new window which slows the shopping process down. In short, you lose my sale. What's there to like from a seller's perspective? Especially when Ebay provides the (far better) mouse-over function FREE. I don't get it.
Imagine if you have thousands of auctions going at a time, management of uploading every single photo could be a nightmare I'd imagine. 3rd party sources like Photobucket and others make the automation process easier for some I'd imagine.
eBay's picture hosting is terrible. The pictures seem to always be the same small size and the mouse-over function barely helps at all. It is one of the reasons I hardly buy on eBay anymore. At least with using a third-party picture hosting service, a seller can put up larger and more detailed pictures.
With the third party hosting you can embed multiple pictures in the description area without paying extra fees to ebay, you can do better enlargements than you can get with ebay picture hosting. The real problem is when people use the third part hosts and then don't take advantage of the extra benefits they could have from using them properly.
The ONLY problem I have with images hosted outside of FeeBay is that a questionable seller can change the photo after his auction closes.
With coin listings, certain services that Auctiva, Inkfrog, Vedio, etc. offer are negligible because you usually only need a couple pictures and that's it. BUT as someone who sells other items, specifically antiques and collectibles, Auctiva more than makes sense It allows me to include up to 24 images free (eBay allows 12 and charges per pic.) They offer 1000's of borders to make the listing more appealing to your target audience. Several formats, and best of all you can upload your pictures for all of your listings at one time as opposed to loading them for individual listings. You can't do this with eBay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Antique-Sil...poon-Shaker-Clear-Glass-Dip-Set-/251164330071
To the best of my knowledge a closed listing can not be revised. Images can be removed, but not changed.
I sure don't get your complaint about Auctiva; you can get a HUGE image, multiple images, far superior to eBay, as part of your $9.95/month fee. There's no comparison. Ebay's so-called enlargement, you have to reposition 4 or 5 times to see the entire item. The other big benefit of Auctiva is free scheduling, normally 10c on eBay. If you want to do your listings at 4 a.m., you can, and still end them on Sunday night, or whatever, no charge. Now if Auctiva would re-jigger its listing format so there's just ONE list instead of half a dozen, they would be perfect. Give me 4 hours with their software guys and it WOULD be perfect.
If you are embedding the image code in your description you can have basically an unlimited number of images for free with a hosting site. If you can get huge images with auctivia, no one doing the auctions I am looking at is using that option. I find the auctiva images take a long time to load, and are usually no larger than the images on the ebay page. usually when I try to get a good look at an image and it turns out to be hosted by auctivia I just back out and go on
You are correct. You cannot revise eBay listing. If you are using a code for your pictures, you are not changing anything on eBay. All you have to do is change the picture the code is referring to.
Actually I like the image handling right here on CT as well as any auction website. No screwing around resizing images, quick multiple uploads, and (usually) two enlargement cycles. When you can make a dime about 4 inches wide, you're doing pretty good. If I were starting a forum*, the software package with our image handling would already have a big leg up on the competition. ===== *I would love to start a "Postcard Talk," for want of a better terminology. But I lack the technical expertise, and it probably costs more than I can afford, although I have plenty of time to run the thing.
