Thanks so much for weighing in here! You obviously looked at the now defunct fee plan of Auctiva with more vigor than I and I will defer to your intimate knowledge of the short lived pricing scheme.

I will admit that my opinion here is clouded by my personal impressions of the eBay Partner Network and it’s obvious lack of ability to retain the quality affiliates that Commission Junction developed over the glory years of eBay’s growth curve.

I won’t go so as to say that EPN is to blame for this fiasco, but they did abandon a long term business relationship with Auctiva and several other affiliate vendors. This was a poor business decision from the perspective of continued growth, possibly a great one if eBay is pinching pennies, which it seems they are.

Cutting off the sources of traffic that made your company the largest ecommerce portal on the planet is counter productive. But it has been just one of counter productive decisions made in the last few years.

As for Auctiva, I stated in my article that I was never a fan, in fact I found them to be less than worthy of my consideration when I was selecting a listing solutions provider. That may be a strong statement, but it is the truth, as I saw it then and as I would see it now.

Auctiva can not provide services for free any longer. And yes, they were/are trying to replace the revenue they lost when EPN closed the flood gates. I suppose the rate structure you mapped out for your readers will give everyone a better idea of just how large that stream of affiliate income was.

As for Auntie May – What would be the saying when the situation is extended to:

eBay fooled Auctiva Shame on eBay, Auctiva tried to fool its customer base of free users, shame on eBay?

eBay is not Free – Long Live eBay!

Auctiva is no Longer Free – Bye Bye Auctiva?

Looking back on the last 16 months, the whole Donohoe era of eBay, I do not understand how any business can think that nothing has changed. This is not driving with sunglasses on in the dark, it is driving with a blindfold, beyond shortsighted.

In my opinion the problem at Auctiva was not so much that users were being told to pay up. The whole pricing structure was so complicated that I had to spend an entire morning making six spreadsheets to figure the price breaks. When I was done I found there were no bargains at any level. In many cases Auctiva was charging more to help sellers use eBay than eBay charges.

Secondly, I am sorry, Auctiva is not Channel Advisor, if they are not providing CA levels of analysis and features and yes advice where have they earned the right to charge listing fees and final value fees?

You get what you pay for you say, uh huh, and if you don’t pay attention you might think you are getting a cell phone and find out you bought a picture of a cell phone.

Auctiva appears to have had a meeting and said “Look chaps, income is off badly, we need to earn $x a month, how shall we structure our pricing to produce that?” Fortunately they came to their senses, but did they do it in time?

The 30 day pay up or get out notice (they knew they were in trouble last year, what were they doing meanwhile? ) added to the virus problem which they handled very poorly and flat lied about, would make me think long and hard before entrusting any part of my business to them. Keyword: trust

As Auntie May says “Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me”

The problem is that many of us have spent thousands of hours uploading images to their servers and building listings in their software. To now have to redo all of that work to switch to another venue in a 30 day period is what is causing a lot of the upset. And, I know, Inkfrog and Seller Sourcebook have importers now. However, after going through this with Auctiva currently and previously having gone through this with SpareDollar, I’m not jumping onto another rocky boat. I’m hosting my own images and using TurboLister. I have no doubt that eBay is going to throw another curveball at third party listing services, and I don’t want to be the effect of that again.