With the release of Dominant Ad Creator 2.3.2, a new assisted submission tool has been integrated which will greatly simplify the task of submitting your listings to the eBay auction site. Although the tool was designing primarily for the US eBay site (eBay.COM) and is only supported for the US site, it may also work correctly for other eBay sites. One site that has now been confirmed to currently work with the submission tool is the United Kingdom domain (eBay.co.uk). To use this tool in con-junction with the UK eBay site, simply copy and paste the below address into the 'Selling URL' section of the selling form and then use the tool as described in the help documentation included.

If you have a different eBay site that you wish to use with the assisted submission tool, you can enter that particular selling URL into the submission utility and then try it out. Again, this tool was only truly tested on the eBay.COM site, and more recently on the eBay.CO.UK site. It is not guaranteed to work on any others at this time, but you can always experiment to find out. I should point out that the tool will ALWAYS work on all eBay sites, however the shortcut buttons are the items that may not work correctly depending on the eBay site you are submitting to. To find the correct selling URL:

1.) Go to the root eBay site you wish to use (such as http://www.ebay.com)
2.) Click on the 'Sell' button at the top
3.) Copy the entire address displayed in the address bar to your clipboard
4.) Paste the copied address into the 'Selling URL' field of the submission tool

To revert back to the default selling page address, click on the > button directly to the left of the Selling URL text field.

Although the FTP capabilities of Dominant Ad Creator make the software significantly easier to use, it can be a little difficult to correctly set the FTP options up initially. There are multiple possibilities as to why the images do not show up when the ad is generated, below are the most common.

One or more of the FTP settings are invalid - If you receive an FTP error while attempting to generate (or list) your ad, then there is a problem with one or more of your FTP settings. The default port (21) will work 96% of the time, but you need to make sure that your username and password are correct. The error message will give you more details about the specific error. Another common error is when the Remote URL path is incorrect.

The FTP WEB IMAGE URL setting is wrong - If this is the case, the images will upload fine and everything will appear to work successfully. However, if the web image URL is invalid, the pictures will not appear in your generated listings. A proper example would be: http://www.auctionorbit.com/ . It is important to have the trailing '/' after the path or it will not work.

Your FTP image host does not allow external sites to access its contents - This is a problem that is most common with free services such as Geocities, in which the images will be on the server fine but they do not allow them to be used on any site other than their own. You may wish to contact your image host to ask about this problem if you feel this is the cause of the images not appearing.

The FTP server is down - It is very common for a server to go down temporarily either for maintanance or another problem. In this case, wait awhile and check again to see if the pictures appear.

Depending on whether you want to find an FTP image host, or a standard HTTP one, there are many options available for you. You will find a variety of HTTP-based image hosts that offer free service from the Free Image Hosts section of Auction Orbit. FTP-based services are rarer and most all of them cost a monthly or annual fee. Depending on who your Internet Service Provider is, they will often provide you with 10 to 20MB of personal web space with FTP access, which can be used for online auctions. Many ISP's will not setup personal space until you ask them too, so you may want to contact your ISP to find out if they offer such a service.

Although the preview pages may sometimes seem frightening, when you actually submit the Dominant Ad Creator ad to eBay it will appear perfectly. The most common defects that appear on the preview page include: Backgrounds or textures appear incorrectly; The auction is stretched out or scaled down more than it should be; text or other formatting features may not appear correctly. All of these problems only occur during the preview mode, due to the complex scripting eBay uses for their site.

This information applies only if the error occurs IMMEDIATELY after launching Dominant Ad Creator. If you do not receive an error until you attempt to open a saved file, please refer to the next answer for a solution.

Although the reasons for such an error can vary, I have determined that 90% of the time the problem is caused by a corrupted preferences file. This can occur if you paste a lot of external content or code into one of the preference fields. Depending on the program that you copy the code from, sometimes invisible data characters are copied as well and when pasted into Dominant Ad Creator, an error will occur next time the software is launched. The following steps will remove the offending settings file and replace it with a fresh copy:

NOTE: Deleting or replacing the preferences file will remove all personal settings you configured (template number, auction terms, etc). It will NOT cause you to lose your eBay specific data used for the automated submitting tool.

1. Restart your computer to ensure that there are no instances of Dominant Ad Creator running.
2. Navigate to the Dominant Ad Creator root directory using either 'My Computer' or 'Windows Explorer'. The default folder is: 'C:\Program Files\Dominant Ad Creator\'.
3. Inside of the Dominant Ad Creator folder, you will see a file titled, 'Settings' or 'Settings.txt' depending on your Operating System's settings. Click on this file to select it (but do not open it).
4. Now press the DELETE key on your keyboard, and select YES to confirm the file's deletion.
5. If you wish, restart your computer once more to ensure the file is out of memory. Now re-launch Dominant Ad Creator and a new settings file will be created and you should not have any further problems.

If the error only occurs when you try to open a previously saved ad, then there is most likely some code or text that was entered/pasted into one of the Dominant Ad Creator fields that is now causing a conflict while trying to re-open the file. Although the latest version of Dominant Ad Creator can handle most of all pasted content, it does sometimes have problems depending what program you copied the information from and what type of content is being pasted. For example, some programs that display data in a 'Rich Text' or another special format, will often have 'invisible characters' that may get copied along with the text without your knowledge. These 'invisible' characters are not registerable as standard text in Dominant Ad Creator, and thus an error is created.

To ensure that this is the problem, open up Dominant Ad Creator and create a very simple ad with no pasted or complex text. Save the ad, then try and re-open it. If it opens successfully but a different ad doesn't, you may want to e-mail me the offending file and I will locate the problem.