Steve Seddon sells audio books from his eBay shop, Okantfoss Audios, and uses Auctiva to showcase his entire range on individual listings. But they’ve been causing him problems…
Many sellers use Auctiva’s services, whether for picture hosting, scheduling, templates or just – as I do – the free scrolling gallery. Recently Auctiva launched a new service: after a sale, they email the winning bidder to confirm the sale and request payment.
Most professional sellers will already be using either eBay’s order confirmation & request for payment emails or their own system, particularly if the only service they use is the scrolling gallery. Another email from a company the buyer doesn’t recognise (maybe we’re getting to the point here) can only be overkill.
Auctiva have by default opted every user “in” to this new service, even if they only ever use the scrolling gallery. They have not publicised the launch to their users, or told users that they need to go into their Auctiva account and disable the setting if they don’t want these emails to be sent to their buyers.
If Auctiva sending spam payment request emails without your permission to your customers isn’t bad enough, these emails are going out weeks after the sale was concluded. Understandably, buyers receiving reminders about orders they’ve paid, received and almost forgotten about, are not happy. Even after opting out, (remember these emails are going out weeks late) the emails keep going right up until the date you switched them off. So, in my case, that’s two more weeks of time wasted answering worried buyers’ emails.
There’s little that can be done now except to switch the emails off and keep reassuring the buyers. But I’ll think twice before allowing a third party free access to my buyers again.
5 Responses
I have had phone calls from worried customers receiving emails from Auctiva also, I am reviewing this at the moment and looking for a replacement service. A lot of my products are bespoke and therefor get dispatched on average 10-14 working days after the order is placed, a customer receiving a reminder 10 days after payment asking for payment is totally unacceptable. Excellent site by the way.
I used to use Auctiva for the slideshow only too, but got a bit disgruntled with them after the images in it would sporadically display and then not display.
I was told on the eBay forums that this was a common problem with them and it happens because Auctiva host the images on their servers and their servers are not up to par, not being a techy guy I do not know about this, I just know it was not what I wanted to happen on my listings.
Anyway a few people on the forum recommended a free scrolling gallery by a website called AuctionPixie – this is what I now use and am happy with the service I receive.
On a side note, I put the link to the web site above in the ‘Website (or eBay Shop)’ box, I don’t know if this was what I was supposed to do or not, but did anyway – lol, that just how techy minded I actually am!?
But back to the point, I really do not know why Auctiva would pull such a move, in my opinion it is a very bad move and I for one would have certainly reconsidered using their service should this had happened whilst I had still been using their scrolling gallery.
Just gone into Auctiva to switch this off, and have been auto-‘threatened’ that this could deprive Auctiva of advertising revenue and hence make them charge me for their service.
AuctionPixie, huh…………. on my way.
Just looked at actionpixie as I had dumped Vendio, thanks for the heads up Sally 🙂
Thanks for the comments, I was tring to figure why this sounded too good to be true, cause nothin’s free. Certainly do not want to bombard my customers with a lot of spam.