It is an inevitable part of a gadget freak's life that surplus gadgets will accumulate. Eventually space will run out and a massive clearance will be required. eBay is the inevitable target, but it's web interface is painful for large numbers of dissimilar items.
With it's usual amazing fortuity, TUAW ran an item about iSale, an ebaying application for the Mac. You get three free auctions as a trial and it was on the third one that I hit a bug with specifying UK post office Special Delivery as the delivery service, it just wouldn't work. Despite this I was impressed enough (and desperate enough) to still go ahead and buy iSale. But then their instant online purchase option also didn't work under Firefox.
I then fired up google intending to find their main site, but instead discovered reviews disappointed with iSale and recommending GarageSale instead.
At first I was not impressed with GarageSale. It's GUI was far less "Mac-like" and it had a confusing method for creating them based around templates that then get launched into auctions. I also found that many of the HTML display templates didn't seem to work with a standard eBay picture size. Their help system is online through a wiki and it had been hacked to advertise someone's auctions rather than explain GarageSale. But despite this, and since Special Delivery worked, I purchased GarageSale.
I must say, it's really grown on me. After 50+ auctions I have got used to the GUI. The item templates are clearly useful if you have identical items, and it's easy to clone them to create new listings of different items and preserve formatting and terms and conditions etc. There is a dashboard widget to track the current status of your auctions without having to go to the eBay site and some nice tracking features to help manage auctions through payment, despatch and feedback. It also includes mail templates with data merging so that you can easily send out messages to buyers to say what's happening.
And iSale ? Well, they acknowledged the Special Delivery bug was a known bug (apparently caused by some changes eBay made). But that's all I've heard for over a month.
