Do you need to look for Turbo Lister alternatives?

Happy Monday everyone!

A short message to all people who are worried about the future without Turbo Lister:

Since eBay has discontinued Turbo Lister, more and more people are sending me emails and asking about the best Turbo Lister alternatives. But do you REALLY need to look for one?

In most cases you don’t – let me explain why.

There’s simply no need to pay for complicated listing tools IF you don’t run a business where you have hundreds and thousands of listings. The new Seller Hub, within eBay itself, is good enough for creating listings and good enough for managing them. It is limited in listing formatting but as I showed in my recent eBay listing formatting video, you can easily do this using free 3rd party tools and still be fine.

I’m talking here about most common situations when you need to list 5-10 items at a time, usually even less. Most people nowadays will import just one or two products from China at a time and then list them on eBay. And for this you don’t really need any extra tools or software – you can simply use Seller Hub.

IF you’re doing some kind of dropshipping scheme or say liquidation stock and need to list 10+ items each day, then yes – you may want to look into some kind of bulk/automated listing tool to use.

But here’s the thing – they will create crappy looking listings. I see them all the time on eBay – the listing looks exactly the same for all products, with some small description block and stock/Google Images.

Well, if you’re trying to get as many listings up on eBay as possible, this is probably the only way to do it. For example when you sell car parts or a large selection of DIY accessories (like bolts, screws etc.) – then I guess the only way to manage this is to create your listings in an automated way using large CSV files/databases.

And in these markets you could probably make decent sales like this.

But in most cases, you really want to create beautifully formatted listings that almost look like sales letters/landing pages.

These are the sort of listings that get the majority of sales in competitive niches and this is what I have always taught you to do. And to create listings like these NO AUTOMATED SOFTWARE WILL HELP YOU! You simply can’t automate this process! You need to work on each listing manually, in a proper HTML editor (like htmleditor.in) to create such beautiful listings.

So you don’t even need dedicated listing software.

As for listing management – copying, re-listing, scheduling and other tasks – the New Seller Hub basically offers the same functionality that Turbo Lister did, so again – no need to look for any additional software or listing tools.

The only real downside of using Seller Hub is that it’s all ONLINE of course. For me it’s not a problem really as I have a very good, hi-speed internet connection but for people with a less stable connection this could be a problem. Unfortunately there’s not much I can advise here as most 3rd party listing tools (like auctiva.com) are also online based. But if you want to work on creating your listing in an offline environment, there are alternatives.

In the video I did I recommended using htmleditor.in, which is an online HTML editor. BUT there are desktop based editors too, many of them. And some are even free. So what you can do is get a desktop HTML editor and work on your listing in offline mode and only when you’re ready to put the listing together, you go to Seller Hub and paste the HTML code there.

Unfortunately (I hate doing this) this type of set-up comes with one huge disadvantage – these tools are usually quite complex and are simply too difficult to master for the average person. I haven’t yet found a simple WYSIWYG editor like htmleditor.in for desktop use. (if you have, please share it with us via the comments box below this post).

I have personally used Coffee Cup (a free editor) in the past and it worked all good for me BUT I’m not a total newbie when it comes to such software, so for some it may be too difficult to master. Anyways, you can download Coffee Cup editor, the free version, and play around with it to see if it’s something you’re comfortable with:

http://www.coffeecup.com/free-editor/

Most people though will prefer the simplicity of online tools, like htmleditor.in – as they’re really nothing more than the Word equivalent of editors, very easy to use, very intuitive – even for people with no programming/HTML skills. So really I’d suggest sticking with them.

OK, that’s it for today – just wanted to make it public that in most cases you don’t have to waste time looking for Turbo Lister alternatives.

Just use Seller Hub and free html editors to format, create and manage your listings.

IF you deal with hundreds or thousands of new listings each month, you probably didn’t use Turbo Lister anyways as it was terrible with bulk processing. You should probably use dedicated software for inventory, cross-marketplace stock management, order processing etc., like Linnworks, Brightpearl, Sellbrite or other such tools with an expensive monthly fee.

This week on Wednesday we’ll have a rather funny story/post about the never ending eBay VS Amazon fight and on Friday we’ll take a closer look at UK fire safety regulations that apply when importing furniture, fabrics and other products from outside the EU.

Have a great week everyone!

Thanks,
Andrew