You'd have thought that putting anything 'Harry Potter'-related on eBay would be a blatant licence to print money. Sadly, for this reviewer, that's not the case. A lavishly-styled Harry Potter ornament, which admittedly looks as if it was made from the porcelain that Armitage Shanks turned down, has three times failed to sell on the world's home of 'crap that you shouldn't be able to flog for an exorbitant price yet strangely you can'. So could Data Becker's SuperSeller for eBay turn Harry's fortunes around?

Er, no. But you'd be hard pushed to say that it was the program's fault. For what the package actually does is take some of the technical work off your shoulders, rather than coming up with some amazing way to make the unsellable sellable. Ignoring the fact that it's plagued by the curse of product activation, the software starts off by getting you to input the basic eBay account details it will come to rely on.

Once done, you come to setting up the auctions themselves. This is a breeze using the software's form-driven system, and is an area where the whole package excels. You can pick from the designs included in the package (there are 200 in all), add as many images as you desire (without incurring extra eBay costs - presumably because this is an officially eBay certified piece of software), include flash animations and calculate the costs all this will incur. It's certainly easy and flexible doing all this offline, and the previewing features are most useful. At the end of it all, the software will upload the auction directly to eBay for you.

But its work doesn't stop there. Through SuperSeller, you can manage the communication process with your bidders and buyers. It's all co-ordinated through an integrated e-mail client, which may sound unnecessary, but if you do a lot of eBay trading then there are distinct advantages to having a client uniquely for eBay business. It can also track auctions for more than one eBay member, so you instantly know how many bids and what price your junk, sorry, valuable item is attracting.

If you haven't guessed by now, SuperSeller is primarily an administrative tool, and a useful one. It cuts down the setting up of new auctions to a straightforward, almost frill-free form-filling exercise, and for us it certainly reduced the amount of time it took to get an auction up and running. Even if Harry remains in our cupboard.

The sticking point for many will be the price tag. At £30, the occasional eBay trader is likely to find it more of a luxury than an essential. However, more regular sellers may well find it money well spent given the time it can potentially save.

They may be better off heading to eBay to buy it though - it was a good few quid cheaper there at the time of writing...

Verdict
A non-essential tool, perhaps, but an efficient, streamlined way for dedicated eBayers to quickly get their auctions up and running.

Company: Phoenix Global Software

Contact: 0870 240 4494

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