( Table Of Contents )

1. Introduction
2. Volcanic Software News
3. eBay changes and additions
4. Online auctions in the news
5. Cool Auction Site of the month
6. Closure
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Introduction

Welcome to the May edition of the Auction Orbit newsletter. If any of you have tried accessing the Auction Orbit website in the past week, you may not have been able to get on. Everything is working again and I will explain what occurred and what impact it has had on Auction orbit in the following section of this newsletter. Also, I am still working on getting a finalized structure for this newsletter, and promise to have a permanent style figured out within the next couple issues! With that said, lets get started!
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Auction Orbit News

As I briefly mentioned in the introduction, both VolcanicSoft.com and AuctionOrbit.com went down on the night of May 24th and did not come back up until the morning of May 28th. This serious downtime was caused due to a variety of rather complicated technical issues. None-the-less, during the time the site was down I was unable to receive any e-mail and of course no-one could access any portions of the site. Since I was unaware as to how long the site would be down, I decided to get a different host so that I would have an alternative if my original hosting service never started up again. Although both hosting services are now back in business, I made the decision to completely switch from the old host to the new one (faster and more reliable server). This switch-over was far from an easy process. The end result is that now all files are hosted directly off of AuctionOrbit.com whereas they previously were only located on Volcanicsoft.com. One of the biggest obstacles in making this change was getting all previous references to Volcanicsoft's domain switched so they reflect the new Auction Orbit addresses. I worked diligently through this past weekend to ensure everything was taken care of and working properly. I feel very good about my new hosting service and the switch that I made, and hope that it will make everyone's experience with using Auction Orbit much faster and enjoyable.

I will be spending the month of June finalizing the site and ensuring that every link and reference is 100% functional. Although the majority of the site works fine already even after the switch, there are still some bugs to stomp out. In fact, the change from Volcanicsoft.com hosting to Auctionorbit.com hosting caused some undesirable effects within Dominant Ad Creator. Anyone who used the animated text or emoticon feature of the software ended up getting invalid images (red x's) displayed in their listings since I switched servers. This was due to the way the software was originally developed and I have now resolved the issue. Although there should not be any noticeable problems even if you continue to use your current version of Dominant Ad Creator, I have re-released version 2.3.1 which completely resolves the issues due to the site-change. Some time in the future (perhaps a year from now) the Volcanicsoft.com domain will no longer function at all in which case you will need to get an updated version of the software to continue using some of its features. If you would like to ensure you have the most compatible version of the software, download one of the options below:

http://www.auctionorbit.com/dac/downloads/dac231.exe (Full download - 3.88MB)
http://www.auctionorbit.com/dac/downloads/dac231u.exe (Upgrade Only - 583KB)

If you have a version of Dominant Ad Creator already installed, simply install the newer files into the same directory as your current install so that the appropriate files will be updated. Again, this is not a required upgrade but if you experience problems with your current install then these new releases should fix the problems you encounter. I will also begin development on the next version of Dominant Ad Creator within the next couple of months. The new version (which may not be released for many months yet) will feature a few good enhancements - all of which will be announced in the next couple of
newsletters. After this month is over and Auction Orbit becomes fully stable, I will focus a lot of my energy on creating a lot of free tutorials and content for the site.
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eBay changes and additions

One of the most talked about changes in eBay's site since April's newsletter is the now permanent implementation of My eBay 2.0. In the last newsletter the feature was still available but you could opt out of it if you wanted to continue using the original - well now everyone is stuck with the new version! There is a lot of heated debate about why eBay decided they needed to upgrade the My eBay page when the original was less cluttered and achieved basically the same results as this one. In fact, a thread was recently started on eBay by a user which acts as a petition against the new My eBay. Already there are around 440 'signatures' and its bound to grow even larger. Unfortunately eBay still has not directly responded to the petition or most of the complaints, and most likely never will. Although many feel the new My eBay page is obtrusive and counter-intuitive, there are a few great enhancements to it over the original. One very nice feature is the ability to see how many watchers you have for each item up for sale. To do so:

1.) Login to your My eBay page

2.) Click on the 'selling' link on the left-side menu

3.) You will see a new column next to each item for sale which is titled '# of Watchers' - The value indicated for each listing indicates how many users have opted to watch your item.

NOTE: The number of watchers does not directly relate to the number of bids you will receive. However, generally the more watchers you have, the greater chance there is that at least one of them will bid on your item by the end.

Another nice implementation is the ability to customize the content presented to you on the My eBay page. While in 'Summary' view, there are several different functions available for each section such as changing the display order, customizing that particular section, or totally deleting a section from the view. For complete details about all of the new My eBay features and additional support, please visit:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/myebay/questions/myebay.html

Other than that, eBay continues to integrate 'Item Specifics' into more and more categories. By early June the Camcorders category will also have this feature implemented in place of the old category format. Again, this is a feature which has received far more negative comments than positive but eBay states that such a feature will make finding the right items easier for potential buyers in the future. I'm sure that both sellers and buyers will adapt to these new implementations as time goes on, but as it stands right now many do not see the point and sellers of 'Item Specifics' categories have stated that they noticed a big drop in sales since the change.
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Online auctions in the news

Before I get into this month's auction article, I want to briefly mention how auction news will be implemented into the Auction Orbit site in the near future. I have created an 'Auction News' room in the forum (http://www.auctionorbit.com/auctiontalk) which is where people can post news articles that pertain to online auctions. The forum was just put up recently there isn't much traffic going to it at this time. Either way, I myself will begin posting news articles as they are discovered into that board for others to read. Please read the few simply rules and guidelines of the Auction News board before posting to ensure your post(s) don't get deleted. Having said that, here is an article that grabbed my attention.

EBay has held several big promotion events in the past, and just recently announced the opening of Camp eBay! According to eBay's announcement, "Camp eBay is the place to learn, shop and win instantly all summer long." They are giving away 525,000 prizes totaling $750,000 from now until the end of September. Just using common sense you can see that if they have that many prizes and the total prize value is not a lot higher, the chance of getting a very good prize is very limited. So what exactly do you do at eBay camp? Well, you earn 'badges' for doing a variety of eBay tasks such as using Buy-It-Now, giving someone feedback, and listening to the audio tutorials about using eBay. Each time you complete a task, you are given a new 'card' which can be unveiled as either a winning ticket or not. You get one free card just for signing up, and I was fortunate enough to win a prize. What prize did I win? Well I won't say exactly what it was but the prize value of it was $1.00! The prizes are mailed out and take between 6 and 8 weeks to arrive. Still, even if the prizes aren't incredible it is still a rather fun experience and they are giving away a supposed $10,000 cash instantly to one special camper. The article below discusses this 'camp' more in-depth.

http://www.campebay.com (Official Camp eBay Site)
http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2004/mft04052802.htm (Article about it)
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Cool Auction Site of the month

The site I selected this time around is a rather humorous game about eBay. There is a good introduction with some great animation, and then you start the game! Although developed years ago, the game is still fun and holds true to the day. The object of the game is to knock both Pierre and Meg off the balcony by throwing random objects at them. Each time you miss you get a negative feedback, and if you get a feedback score of (-3) you become NARU'd. Knock the 'king' and 'queen' off and you get awarded with a shooting star and win the game! Its a very quick game but still proves to be mildly entertaining. You will need the flash player installed to properly view and play the game.

http://www.ioffer.com/feepay/
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Closure

We've come to the end of yet another Auction Orbit newsletter. In the next few issues don't be surprised to see a switch of sections. I am also trying to find the best way to produce and mail out these newsletters as the current system is rather tedious. I am working hard to come up with a final structure that I can follow for all upcoming newsletters so that it is both entertaining and informative to the readers. I will also be looking into a better HTML layout for the newsletters when they get posted on to my site, as right now it is basically a copy and paste from the text-only version. That's all for now, Take care!

Sincerely,

Matt
http://www.auctionorbit.com