I do eBay sales on a highly irregular basis but I bought Auction Wizard a few years ago to make the process easier and go more smoothly. But, lately, I feel less sure about its usefulness, especially in regard to the e-mail problem which has been brought up here.

My last couple of eBay Sales (back in early May) were problematical. On the first one, the buyer wrote to me (through the eBay Web site) shortly after the auction ended asking for an invoice. I had already sent my usual e-mail invoice through Auction Wizard and, after receiving her e-mail, sent the message out again. The next day she sent another request so I gave up and sent the invoice through the eBay Web site (and it was difficult to make it fit within the character limitations of their messages).

On the second auction, although I had the buyer's e-mail address through e-mails he wrote to me (again, via eBay's Web site), my responses bounced, and, again, I had to send messages to him through the eBay Web site. (By the way, neither of these e-mail addresses were Yahoo, Hotmail, or AOL.)

The transactions were completed but all that back and forth-ing to the Web site and copying and pasting rather defeats the usefulness and function of Auction Wizard. I realize eBay wants to make claims as to greater security and avoidance of spam but they are also trying to keep people attached to their Web site as much as possible. But, as I say, this is a serious drawback to the usefulness of Auction Wizard. And your suggestions of leaving notes in packages or reminding buyers to put your e-mail address in the "Accept Messages from" list doesn't do any good when you're sending out initial messages after an auction has ended and the message doesn't get through!

In another area, I set up two auctions today and had a very difficult time getting them uploaded to eBay. On the first auction, the program would frequently stall on "downloading timestamp.html" so I would abort the upload and start again. If it got through that problem, it would upload the first picture but not the second one. The screen was just ticking down seconds and didn't appear to be doing the upload (even slowly) but there was no real information as to what was going on so I ultimately had to abort that process, again, after several tries. I finally gave up and loaded the auction through eBay's Web site which is a fussy and cumbersome process.

The second auction took a long time to upload (with only one photo) but it finally happened. It took almost an hour to process these two auctions and they're for small items so hardly worth that much effort. As I say, I don't sell a lot of items, but when I do, I expect Auction Wizard to make the process happen more quickly and smoothly than having to go through all the steps manually. But these recent experiences make me wonder if Auction Wizard is really keeping up with how things are working out there, especially this problem with the e-mail rendered quite ineffective.