I've been using AW since its BETA days, and I must be pretty happy with it, cuz I'm still using it! And every chance I get, I sneak in a suggestion to those poor souls still using eBay's listing software that they give AW a try. But every now and then, I try to break out of my complacency and think like I'm new to the program and can see its faults more clearly. No program is perfect. I think AW is the best out there, but it could still be better. We have been asking for a number of enhancements for a long time now, and I don't recall seeing many of them incorporated in recent years. Lots of users would like to see Bonanzle added, and others crave a delayed-listing capability. Instead of focusing on the bigger wishes, I've compiled a list of smaller wishes I've had for a long time.

Even though I know my way around AW fairly well, there are still ways of doing things I'm not familiar with, so if any of these suggestions are already do-able, I hope someone will let me in on the secrets.


== Need to be able to run a Find Record by Category (with the weekly category updates from eBay, maybe this is impractical). When I have a buyer who is delaying payment to see if I list more of something, I need to be able to search my Off Line Lots for whatever that Category is. Let's say it's dolls or car prints. Searching on the word doll or car in Titles isn't very helpful, because (1) I may not have put those words in the titles (the categories cover those words), and (2) the Find engine is way too broad. It'll turn up everything with doll or car anywhere in a word (dollar; cart; scary).

And speaking of the Find engine......

Need to be able to tell AW to search Records "tight" vs "loose". I was looking for a Lot with Ace in the title. AW returned dozens of Lots, including those with face and lace and base in the titles. Searching on the word cat returns not only catalog, but even certificate and delicate! Waste of time.

Also, AW's Find engine "sees" punctuation -- tie-dye vs tie dye. If I could remember whether I'd added a hyphen, I probably wouldn't be needing to search around for the Lot.

== When we filter for Off Line, enable us to run a Find on what might be called List Count. We would type in a number and tell AW to show all Lots either above or below that List Count. That way, we could find things that have been relisted too many times or have been listed only once or twice.

== Enable us to show TWO Profiles at once. Would make it much easier to move things from auction to Store when selecting things to relist. And selecting All Profiles puts way too many offline items in the mix (mostly because several of my Profiles are not listing Profiles).

== Why do we still have Do Not Specify Shipping Costs, when eBay has for a long time been blocking listings with no shipping details indicated? Yeah, I know...this one's a quibble.

== Very few (any -- ??) fields in AW support drag and drop. I am constantly dragging text to and from digital post-it notes, and I would really like to be able to use drag and drop for AW fields rather than having to do the more cumbersome copy-paste.

== Allow the Record-Find window to remain on top when it reports "No Matching Records Were Found", so we don't have to keep hitting OK and reopening it when searching for several records.

== When there's a price in the Shipping Cost field, and then you change to Calculated Shipping, seems like that original shipping cost should disappear. The fact that it remains can cause confusion, especially when getting ready to contact a buyer.

== I have 10 Profiles, but only 4 of them are actually LISTING Profiles. In the Select-Auction-Lots-to-List window, it would be much better to be able to put checkmarks next to the Profiles we wish to list in than to have to UNCHECK those we don't want to list in (is there a setting for this I'm unaware of?). Another way to accomplish this would be to have a setting that tells AW we will never actually list anything in certain Profiles, so they don't even show up in the Auction-Lots-to-List window.

== When submitting queued Lots in multiple Profiles, it would be great if the lister could move on to the next Profile automatically (Or am I missing something here? Does everyone sit there and wait for AW to pop up and ask if you want to list in the next Profile? I put 90 seconds between my auction-style listings, so I might have to sit here for 15 or 20 min until it moves onto the next Profile).

== And something many of us have had on our wish lists for years and years: please add a column to Grid View for the Lot Titles.

== Dragging the scroll bars/buttons in places like the Store Category list and Grid View does not move the view -- does not move the list up and down in "real time", as it does with other programs. It just waits till you let go and then pops you to that location, so it's always just a guess how far to drag the button. And using the up/down arrows is VERY slow. Also, using the mouse scroll wheel doesn't move the list up and down -- the arrow/hourglass flickers, and eventually -- it's very slow -- AW "catches up", but you still just get popped somewhere -- you can't really control where that will be.

== When in the main Email window, there should be an option for having the Database Record Panel always showing.

== It would be very useful to be able to right-click on open email messages in the Window-List-Buttons column and select to close them.

== Would like to be able to run a Record:Find for all Lots having the word, say, "sheet music" in the titles, and then have a way to consolidate them all into a single Lot, with the sum of the listing fees and the items' costs automatically entered into those fields. All the Descriptions would be pasted, one above the other, into the Description window and could then be edited. There could be an option to bring in the old images, though most users would replace them with a new group photo. I don't know of any way to get a workable list of all of some type of item without having created a Profile specifically for them. And since we cannot do a Record:Find on a Lot's Category, that doesn't help either.

== When we are clicking through Lots (Page Up/Page Down), it would be very helpful to be able to see a thumbnail of the first auction image while we have any tabs open other than Description and Images.

Well, that's it for now. I hope the next update can incorporate some of these features.

Sue