Auctomatic in open beta now | Hacker News Reader

Auctomatic in open beta now

auctomatic.com

15 pointsrms10 comments

Congrats! Some first impressions:

- http://www.auctomatic.com/app/username is a little strange. Would it be a big headache to remap it to http://www.auctomatic.com/username?

- It would be really neat if you could have a preview button when you're setting up your auction that generates a full preview. That is, the preview would generate HTML identical to Ebay's but with your auction info.

Thanks for the feedback!

On your points:

- To prefix or not to prefix is always a tradeoff (as in, http://twitter.com/ev vs. http://google.com/a/foo.com). We wanted to keep some of that tasty top level namespace open, and figured /app/ would be an easy prefix to remember.

- That's definitely a good point, and something we're quite likely to do soon.

Maybe if you made it easier to identify with? For example, 'my' or 'i' or 'im' instead of app.

Also, points for not requiring an ebay account until absolutely needed. A+++++ will visit again

As someone that's a professional seller on eBay, the URL will be the last thing I'm going to worry about (bookmark it, done!). What matters to me is how are you going to help me increase my sales and margin while lowering my eBay fee.

btw... what is the different between your service and something like Auctiva? As far as i can tell, they're already doing everything that you offer and they're FREE! (they take a cut from my insurance sales instead of 1% of total sale)

hey cyggie, thanks for your feedback.

re Auctiva:

1) we plan to differentiate in the future by working with other platforms (Amazon, Google etc). 2) a Gold level powerseller told us: "I have found that Auctiva has very little "value-added" over the plain vanilla eBay tools. My hope is that your final product will be an improvement both in ease of use and cost over eBay/Auctiva", which also hints at our goals. There is a lot we can do to help sellers optimize, and more than that, introduce some real "ease-of use" into this market.

All the initial feedback we have had suggests we are on track with both. I'd be happy to discuss any insights you may have to help us improve, drop me a line at kul at auctomatic.com.

By the way, we've also got a reddit style site set up for requesting features at: http://features.auctomatic.com

Thus far we've mostly used it internally to track requests people have emailed us, but it's time to open it up. So, if you signed up for an Auctomatic account and have some ideas, we'd love to hear about them.

Thanks!

trying to confuse the competition? :-) (where XXXXXXX is the site name and YYYYYYY is the session id (?)).

looks great though!!

https://auctomatic.com/app/XXXXXXX_run.py?=YYYYYYYY

https://auctomatic.com/app/XXXXXXX?_main.asp=YYYYYYYY

https://auctomatic.com/app/XXXXXXX?_autoexec.bat=YYYYYY

https://auctomatic.com/app/XXXXXXX?_run.arc=YYYYYYYYYY

https://auctomatic.com/app/XXXXXXX?_dispatch.fortran=YYYYYYY

Didn't pg say somewhere that Viaweb included cgi-bin in urls for the same reason?

Edit: Yes. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4625

Making eBay suck less, what a bloody good idea!

I will be giving your site a try next time I sell something on eBay...

This seems like a great idea! Congrats.

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