Dear Auction Wizard 2000 team,
I just reviewed AW2000 2.2 beta and here are some notes I made. Please accept some criticism only as the way to upgrade AW2000 from "The Best eBay Seller Tool" to "PRICELESS The Best eBay Seller Tool". I strongly believe that most of AW2000 users will benefit from these suggestions and ideas and I will be repaid for my time and effort if any of these will be considered and implemented. Thank you for your great work and please feel free to contact me if I did not express myself clearly in some cases.
01. 21M download !!! - Let's see if it worth waiting...
02. Checking for previously installed components???!!! - That's not smart. Why don't they keep the path of installed application in windows registry and get it from there, and ask me If I'd like to install it to that directory or change it with "browse" or just click "ok". instead of scanning 128000 files in 9000 folders on my hard drive which takes about half an hour. What if I would keep my AW2000 in c:\work\ instead of c:\program files\ it would scan my hdd for couple of hours... :( 03. Quite fast install, restructure db. - Good.
04. New logo! - Promising.
05. All the same interface, Windows 95 icons. - Boring. But that's OK. Let's look for new functionality and features, that matters.
- There is still no convenient keyboard way to switch between program windows. One-key/hot-key switch to each of "inv.items", "auct.lots", "invoices", "ledger", "email" windows. Behavior or Ctrl+Tab is unpredictable. I would expect it to work like Alt+Tab in windows, that would be convenient.
06. Inventory items window. - Oh, they split "committed quantities" to two separate windows: lots and invoices that's good, but I'd prefer to see them one by the other instead of one on top of the other, so I'd be able to see more items in each of these windows. - The other thing which is "must have" in these two windows is the status of a lot and invoice. Because when I go through inventory and decide should I list this item or not I have to know is any one of these lots is an "off-line" lot.
07. Inventory items window/Auction info tab - Can I have "Store category" select box longer so I wouldn't need to scroll in it? Just a thought...Just a thought... 08. Inventory items window/Categories and Item Specifics - I'd guess that "ebay category" and "ebay store category" will be the same in 99% of cases. It would be so nice if I would have to choose it ones and the other one would be filled automatically keeping the ability to change it manually. - Over 60% of my items fall into a category specifics for which has not been implemented yet (...jewelry\rings...). :( Well, I hope it will be done soon.
09. Inventory items window/Grid View - Here is some serious "must have" stuff. FILTERS. I desperately need an ability to apply filters on records shown in grid view. When I create lots from inventory instead of browsing through 1000s of records I need to see only those records which have (Qty.Avail. > 0). When I'm preparing an order of merchandize I need to see only records with (Qty.In.Stock == 0). I want to see only records with (inventory category == "My eBay Store") and then sort them by Reference ID. I want to see all records which have substring "xxx" in the title and then sort them by Inventory category. etc....
10. Auction Lots - I think that Reference ID should be shown on a main screen instead of Additional fields, because it's the main identifier of a kind of an item so it should be available at a glance.
- Couple of additional (maybe user defined) lot statuses would be helpful. Sometimes when you perform mass operations on auction lots you need some temporary "place" to put some of your items and "hold" could be already in use.
- Customizable toolbar would be great. I never use first 9 buttons and last 4. I would happily replace them with "update lot", "update all lots", "list queued lots", "generate invoices", "user defined web sites"...
- Here is a tricky one: (I will be talking about STOCK inventory records) There is no way to detach auction lot from inventory record if it was created based on one. Why to do that? I have two inventory categories: "ebay", and "store", so I have two records in inventory for the same kind of item one with inv.category="ebay" and the other with inv.category="store". This way I can list similar items to my ebay store and to ebay separately and have separate tacking for them. The problem comes when I don't want to list some item to ebay any more and I want to move it to the store. If I just change Auction Profile from 'ebay' to 'store' I will mess up my separate tracking of ebay and store items in inventory. So that I have to copy Auction ID from "ebay" lot, delete the lot, fix quantity in inventory record connected to that "ebay" lot, find "store" inventory record of the same item, add one to quantity, create "store" lot based on this inventory item, go to new lot and paste Auction ID. And by the way, doing so make me loose track of fees "collected" on this item. It would be so much easier if I could just detach the lot in question from "ebay" inventory record and attach it to "store" inventory record.
- !!!BUG!!! At least it's almost a bug. If I "duplicate lot" which is connected to a stock inventory record newly created lot becomes connected to the same stock inventory record and this operation CHANGES quantities in inventory. At least it has to let me know that I just committed one more item from stock. If I could detach the lot newly created by "duplicate lot" from stock inventory record I'd be able to use "duplicate lot" as a convenient way to use one lot as a "template" of a new lot, and then change a picture, title etc.
- As a conclusion ability to detach/attach an auction lot from/to stock inventory record would be great addition to flexibility of AW2000 and would be just in accordance with a "spirit" of AW2000.
- All I said about FILTERS for inventory items applies to auction lots as well. I want to filter out all "online" items with the same Reference Id and sort them by the "starting date". I want to see only items listed last week to store category "xxx" and then sort them by Reference ID. I want to see all "online" items with HighBidder == "yyy". etc....etc....etc.... Filters is one the basics when you work with database. Isn't it?
11. Invoices - Number of items in current invoice shown somewhere, in status bar for instance, would be so helpful.
- Same thing about tool-bar. I'd rather see "notify winning bidders", "print shipping labels", "leave feedback" buttons there.
- Very simple situation: My shipping is "X" for the first item and "Y" for each additional one, and I do not use multiple item auctions(for now). Is it possible that when more than one item are combined into one invoice AW2000 would set "shipping cost" of the first invoice item as "X" and "Y" for all following items. Now I have to do it manually for each invoice consisting of more than 1 item. May be "additl.item ship." field could be used to implement that.
- I would be happy to have "discount" field as a property of an invoice.
- Ability to apply FILTERS on invoices is "A MUST" as well as on lots and inventory records. I want to see all invoices of buyer "X" between dates and sort them by shipping date. etc...etc...etc...
- If double click on payment record in "Payments" window would open payment record form instead of ledger I would save a step. If Right click on payment record in "Payments" window would give me "delete" option that would be cool.
12. Ledger - I've nothing to say about it besides that I do not use it, so why it would be one of the main windows?
13. Email - I'd be happy to be able to change an order of email folders. - Add sender to address book on right click on email in the list. - Text search in email body. - Here is "MUST HAVE" one: buttons like "reply to message", "reply using template" and "forward message" but for emails that I have sent. So I will be able so send follow up email which would contain my previous message, or just forward my own email to someone, and follow up using template would be just great. 14. Reports - I took just a brief look at reports and I see that all reports I would be interested in don't have enough parameters which would let me select only some type of records to be shown. It's pretty much the same as situation with filters. I'd like to see invoice profit report for one buyer, or one particular invoice by # I'd like to see inventory items quantity in stock of which is 0. I'd like to see inventory Stock Item Qty, but only for those records where Title has substring "xxx". etc...etc...etc... And as far as I understand report designer would not let me to form conditions.
15. HTML template editor - Right now I have to dance my html code around pieces of html code inserted by AW2000. It would be so cool if there would be a way when I can have only one page component and it's only my html code without any code inserted by AW2000 besides fields like <#Title>, <#LotNumber>, <#ShippingCost> etc. Only the thing needed is to have a structure like: <#Repeat> <#LotImage> <#/Repeat> Which would repetitively insert block of html code inside of <#Repeat> <#/Repeat> for each image of an auction lot. Then for instance I can do:
<Table> <tr> <#Repeat> <td> <IMG SRC="<#LotImage>"> </td> <#/Repeat> </tr> </Table>
and have:
+--+ |p1| +--+ |p2| +--+ |p3| +--+
or I can do:
<Table> <#Repeat> <tr> <td> <IMG SRC="<#LotImage>"> </td> </tr> <#/Repeat> </Table>
and have:
+--+--+--+ |p1|p2|p3| +--+--+--+
or what ever else I will be able to think of.
16. General ideas. - This is serious "must have" one: I think it would be really cool if you would implement several simultaneous parallel http connections to ebay and run for example update lots over them. It's guaranteed that on DSL/Cable connection update will be 2-3 times faster. That would be real time saver and it well worth it. Have you seen how it's done in download managers? Check out "reget" or something of that nature.
- In program options/general/jpeg output quality, check box "original quality" would be appreciated.
- The window shown after update of all lots is finished. What I do when there were some errors? I scroll down 1000s of lines looking for errors, write down lot #s of lots with errors, close the window, find lots by # and re-update them manually one by one. What I would like to see? A button "re-update erroneous lots" would be the best, or at least list of erroneous lots opened in notepad so I can copy/past ## and don't have to scroll looking for them.
- Why don't you show up on www.solutions.ebay.com?
Best regards,
Yakov.
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