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I know we promise this a while ago, but I think you’ll agree that the wait was worth it. Meagan, Jermaine, and I have been working hard on these redesigns, and we really hope you like them. You can purchase these shirts from our account atZazzle.com. Of course our winner, April, will be getting her very own shirt for free.

Special thanks to everybody that helped make this contest possible, either by submitting an entry, voting, or helping out here in the office. We appreciate it. I think we’d like to do more of these in the future, and I think that this experience has definitely proved that it’s possible. Even if you do have interns running the show.

Anyway, I have a feeling this is going to be the last your hear from us (the interns) for a little while. But we’re still around. Working hard on all sorts of neat things. So until next time, keep on eBay’n the easy way.

We’ve been quietly working on some new features for the last couple of months, and we are finally ready to unveil them.

New Premium eBay Templates!
We have added a new section to the template area. You can now choose from our “premium” templates area for 14 amazing new designs that each has multiple color choices. We have also added 3 new FREE templates!

For 50 cents, List’d users can choose from 14 “premium” templates, each with multiple color choices, in themes ranging from technology to baby clothes. Users can also choose to pay $5.00 for 30-day unlimited use of any of the premium templates. They also have three new free templates to choose from.

As always, all of the features that you’ve grown to love about List’d are still free to use. Premium templates are our first stab at creating a value added feature that we think you would be willing to pay for. These payment will be made through PayPal, since 85% of you have that capability. Thanks for giving them a try!

Default Your Favorite Settings
You can now go into your profile page to save your favorite settings. We had a lot of heavy users asking us for this ability, and we think it will really make your lives easier. All you need to do is login and click on the “Profile” link where you can:

• Add a default “boilerplate” text area into each listing
• Change your password
• Set your shipping options
• Pick a default template

Login and try out the new features. Tell us what you think, that’s how we’ve been able to get List’d to where it is already. Your feedback is what made this tool great

Prepare to witness a “site” like none other. You will be mesmerized, tantalized, and electrified right down to your pinky toe. We the interns (aka the Permaterns) have created such a monster of a contest, we thought the perfect time to unveil it would have to be on Halloween.

“What is this contest?”, you may be asking yourself. Jason, Meagan, and I were tasked to create a T-Shirt design contest for List’d from scratch. We had to create the entire website, voting system, content, and even find ways to mass produce the awesome shirts we plan on seeing come our way.

Ok, let me be honest. At first we were told that we need to come up with a t-shirt design for List’d. Being the awesome interns that we are, we convinced upper management to trust us with creating a contest. This not only took our attention off of less exciting projects but it also gave us a venue to display our awesome talents, besides those of fetching coffee (not that we ever did that or anything).

So here are the details:

1. You can submit as many designs as you want, but you can only vote for a specific design once.
2. The top ten entries with the most votes will automatically received the new t-shirt which will be crafted from the ultimate champion winner person’s design.
3. Once we have a top ten, the Permaterns will pick the one we like the best and they will receive the grand prize in addition to their artwork on a shirt.
4. The grand prize will be a $50 iTunes music gift card that you can use through iTunes for games, movies, and of course music.
5. The contest begins November 1st and runs through November 23rd. After the 23rd, we will not receive anymore submissions but you will have an extra week to vote on your favorite design. Keep in mind that you can vote anytime you want throughout the contest.

We’ve got some new updates to List’d that everyone is going to be excited about. We launched just 8 weeks ago, and during that whole time we have been listening and responding to each and every feedback email. Your feedback has been instrumental in us making these changes, and we’re grateful for your insights.

Calculated Shipping
First off, a number of you have been asking for eBay’s “Calculated Shipping” feature. This has been added and is now part of the new listing tool. You still have the options for “no shipping” or a flat fee, so this third option should give you even more control and will also provide a better user experience for your buyers.

The new Calculated Shipping interface

Listing Length: More Options
You’ve asked for the ability to create listings of varying lengths. Now you can put an item on eBay for 3, 5, 7, or 10 days.

The new interface for listing length

There are a number of other small tweaks, all made to tighten the application up and make your experience better. As always, please contact us if you have any suggestions or problems. We’re always interested in hearing your thoughts.

For those of you who have heard from us about coming features that aren’t listed here, be assured that we are working on them, some changes take longer than others.

One of the discussions we’ve been having around the List’d office lately, is the fact that eBay is not the end-all be-all of eCommerce. These thoughts were born out of some research that we did into eBay trends and eCommerce statistics.

We believe that eBay is a great place to list your items, but it might make sense to think of it as a marketing channel for your eCommerce store.

It’s time to stop thinking of eBay as representative of the opportunities available within the ecommerce marketplace. Though eBay holds 14% market share in the $313 billion global ecommerce market – that only serves to highlight how much more is available.

It appears that eBay is having a demand problem – for some reason, people just aren’t buying as much.

(HT: Scott Wingo)

The Sellers’ Story
At the micro-level, there has been a growing amount of resentment towards eBay and its heavy-handed policies. What was once grudgingly accepted as the price of making a lot of money on eBay is not accepted any longer – since not as much money is being made.

Merchants are beginning to transition off of a heavy eBay diet to a multi-channel one. For many individuals and small businesses, that means opening their own web store, many times on their own domain. Most are realizing that there are other marketplaces and pushing some inventory towards those channels. Examples include Yahoo, Amazon, Craigslist and Google Base. The truth is, once eBay merchants go multi-channel, the other channels are typically more profitable.

There are a growing number of sellers who see eBay more as a marketing channel than an actual sales channel. Because eBay does provide a good deal of traffic, they can keep the cash flow positive by selling on eBay. However, this comes at the cost of higher margins which are found elsewhere. Many are moving their own core inventory to their own websites and using eBay only as a marketing tool.

Summary
We believe List’d is one of the best tools you can find to list single items on eBay. If you’re strictly an off-eBay merchant, take the time to see what can happen when you sell a few items on eBay. See if it increases the number of people coming to your store – you might not have as big of a margin on that sale, but you’ll raise awareness of your store for when they decide to buy again.

Many eBay sellers host their images on Photobucket to save money with eBay listing fees. We’re proud to announce that List’d has partnered with Photobucket to make it even easier to list an item on eBay. Anyone with a Photobucket account can easily select images from Photobucket when creating eBay listings through List’d Express.

Photobucket (www.photobucket.com), named the fastest growing site of 2005 by Nielsen/Netratings, allows members to store and share their visual digital content online, such as video, images, and graphic art. With over 22 million users growing by over 65,000 users per day, Photobucket serves over 50 billion images every month.

Of course, all users of List’d Express get free image hosting (whether using images from their own computer or Photobucket), free scheduled listings, and free listing templates. This is a partnership that makes a lot of sense for us at List’d, and we’re excited to offer it to our users.

So, what does it look like? See below:

Choosing images from “my computer”

Choosing images using the new Photobucket plugin

Again, you can choose images from both your computer and Photobucket for a listing. We hope you enjoy it. Let us know what you think in the List’d Community Forums.

(Note: our new partner, Photobucket, has just had an increased round of investment. It’s amazing to see just how popular they are.)

It’s fun to see the List’d tool start to get a few people noticing it in the Web 2.0 world. Ajaxian, a rather well known reviewer of Web 2.0 sites that use AJAX (like we do) noticed us today.

To all the non-techies out there, AJAX is the type of code we write to make the user experience better for you. AJAX makes List’d Express work fluidly and behave intelligently and that saves you extra work – you can particularly see it when using the keyword category finder.

Ina Steiner at AuctionBytes was also kind enough to think of us in her recent newsletter This & That: Online Auction Roundup. Thanks Ina, AuctionBytes is one of our daily reads, so we appreciate the nod.

It was neat to see the first international blogger pick us up, Benoit Descary from France did just that today.

Postbubble recently ran a story on us. I particularly like this one because it covers both our strategic business moves in the months ahead and also the fact that eBay’s lack of change has even allowed us to create List’d Express at all.

Other bloggers who have covered List’d Express:
World Tech Logic
Swik.net

“eBay Seller’s Dream: 1-Page eBay Selling Tool with AJAX”
No more going through 5 pages to list an item on eBay. A new application, List’d Express (www.listd.com) makes it simple and easy to list an item in one AJAX-enabled page. Best of all, it’s free.

Vote for it if you get a chance and have a Digg registration.

read more | digg story

What is also interesting is seeing some of the other bloggers who have picked up on the piece and tried the tool out. See their posts:

iBloggedThis (love the title of this blog, by the way)
Ryan’s Life
BlogCharm
PowerSellerKing

You’ve Got History
We’ve added a new section in List’d Express that tracks your history of listings using the tool. You can now sort and find past auctions, view upcoming scheduled listings, and also see what the current bids are on your live eBay auctions.

Those who have listed an item will see that it at work already.

Additional Refinements
Since our goal is to make this the easiest, simplest and best eBay listing tool on the market, we continue to refine the tool. In this newest upgrade we’ve added a link to the eBay shipping calculator tool (a request) and notifications of when a scheduled listing has been processed (another request).

So, thank you again for giving List’d Express a try. Without going into great detail, I can tell you that we have some pretty big things ahead.

More Templates to Choose From
You can now choose from two more great looking listing templates within List’d Express. We noticed that many of our users were going with the simple yellow and black template, so we added a new magenta colored one that also has a simple and elegant layout as well.

If you’re a technology seller, you’ll be happy to see that we’ve added a new technology template that will make your tech look more professional than ever.

Lastly, there is now a “none” option. So, if you don’t want to use any template at all, choose this option. This last one was a direct request from a number of users – so, we are listening, keep talking to us.

Give List’s Express a try, it’s FREE!