The first road bump on the path to selling on eBay is the selection of auction management software. Whether the applications are server hosted or downloadable, auction sellers need this 'middle man' to transfer their sales listings and images to eBay, Amazon, Yahoo! or any other auction venue's server. While eBay offers its own auction management tools, many, if not most sellers prefer third party products.

For several reasons, a majority of sellers use server hosted platforms rather than downloadable desktop models. While desktop software with a one-time fee or moderate annual fees have the advantage of being cheaper in the long run, server hosted systems are accessible from any Internet connected PC. Beyond this convenience, it keeps the user's files safely backed up, eliminating the fear of losing records due to a hard drive crash and/or improper backup. In general, the latest innovations are quicker to appear on the hosted services, and many offer a wide and current array of useful features under one roof — from auction tracking to market research.

Today, we're reviewing one of the largest of the hosted auction management services, Andale. Next week, we follow up with a lineup of the alternate sites and software.

Andale, founded in 1999, bought free hosting service Honesty.com in 2000, incorporating it into the Andale pay site in 2001. From that point on Andale offered a comprehensive and impressive array of features aimed at attracting all — from eBay's smallest small fries to the largest of its Power Sellers. Andale was the first third party service to sign eBay's Licensing Agreement and provide a research product on its site, which now has a database of over one billion completed eBay auctions.

Currently, Andale offers free counters used by millions of sellers, and according to Prashant Nedundgadi, Andale's Chief Technology officer, paying users numbering in "the high ten thousands." However, the paid user pool undoubtedly took a major hit in the fall of 2005.

On October 31, 2005, Andale suffered an outage that lasted the better part of two weeks. According to Nedungadi, the problem began with a faulty storage driver card that corrupted both its primary and back-up databases. Occurring at the start of the lucrative holiday selling season, by the second week of the outage eBay was compelled to e-mail Andale users with a list of alternative hosting services. By December 1, 2005 eBay stated that Andale had failed to meet the terms of the partners, Service Level Agreement (SLA,) falling below 99.97 percent up time and failure of notifying technical problems within 30 minutes. The result of all this was that many Andale users (this seller included) migrated to different services.

In response, Andale conducted a two-month audit of its entire operation and brought in third party oversight. Claiming the problems behind them now, with an uptime of 99.99 percent and safeguards in place against a repeat disaster, Andale remains at the forefront of third party auction management services on eBay. We recently gave the post-outage Andale a spin around the eBay block.

One of Andale's many auction management tools are its plethora of customized page view counters.

Andale is an a la carte, pay site. The site constantly adds or improves features — although some features do seem like flat-out fluff, such as the choice of over 100 backgrounds for the counter page. On the other hand, Andale offers much state of the art technology and several alternatives for virtually all eBay auction and Store selling functions.

This begins with the FTP (file transfer protocol) task of uploading images from your PC or digital camera to Andale's servers. There is a manual type-in or search page uploading of up to 32 images at a time (in our test, an uploading of 11 images took about 40 seconds). An alternative "Power Uploader" requires ActiveX controls, but allows for bulk uploading of unlimited numbers of files from a PC folder in an easy, straightforward manner: two cursor clicks adds each image to the upload file. The image archive lists in order of upload, contains a thumbnail and image size. Tools allow for image resizing, cropping and rotation.

Image hosting plan prices begin at $2.00 per month for 3 MB of space and $2.50 for each additional MB, up $65 for 150 MB, with decreasing prices for additional storage.

The auction listing feature comes in two versions. "1 Step Lister 1.0" is the original version and is straightforward — it always was well designed and easy to use, and remains so. The first page requires category selection. On the second page, everything else, from sub-category, sale title and description boxes, 6 layout options, features, several means to upload images, and all the other eBay auction and Store requisites and options. A cursor click at the bottom of the page launches listings to eBay, eBay Motors, Stores, Yahoo! or Andale Stores.

Apparently, the 1 Step Lister will soon be phased out in favor of 1 Step Lister 2.0, which incorporates all functions onto one page and contains several extra features such as market specific functions, checkout and post-auction settings options. For high volume sellers there is the patent pending, Lister Pro, a 29 MB desktop monster designed to speed up bulk uploading, offering automated shipping features and restriction options for employee access, etc.

We opted first for an auction launch using the original 1 Step Lister, and found it the way we left it in: fast and responsive in listing and posting a sale to eBay auctions. Perhaps rusty from being off the site since December, somehow our first eBay sale posted with Andale was double-listed. This has only happened three or four times over posting thousands of sales on eBay, (on other sites as well as Andale,) and usually occurs when the user tries to push through an apparently frozen page.

Shrugging, we forged on, with no subsequent problems, including using 1 Step Lister 2.0 which seems somewhat quicker once you adjust to the different format. Andale hosted images are high resolution, appearing crisp and clear in eBay sales.

Listing plans start at ten images for $2.00, 40 for $7.50, and range up to $224.95 for 5,600 listings, with additional listings ranging from eight to 50 cents each above the plan levels.