eBay’s Turbo Lister has been around for a long time and has helped hundreds of thousands of users sell on eBay. A program doesn’t stay around as long as Turbo Lister without having some advantages. Turbo Lister has always been an easy way to get items quickly listed on eBay and as an added benefit, it’s free.
However, just because a tool is quick, easy, and free, it doesn’t mean it is the best tool for the job. It may be free, but if it doesn’t save you all the time it should, you could actually be losing money. Likewise, quick and easy is great, but if it doesn’t do everything you need it to do, then it could be holding your business back. Even though you may think you are doing fine with Turbo Lister, it would be worth a few moments of your time to explore what SixBit has to offer.
SixBit and Turbo Lister are really the only two viable desktop-based listing tools for eBay. You can think of SixBit as Turbo Lister on steroids. When Turbo Lister no longer meets your needs, SixBit is the next obvious step and is available in 3 versions to grow with you (Home and Hobby Edition - $19.99/mon., Small Business Edition - $34.99/mon., or Enterprise Edition - $69.99/mon.)
SixBit...
- has all the features of Turbo Lister, plus much more
- is very reliable
- can adapt and grow with your business
Let’s take a closer look.
Features You Shouldn’t Be Without
“You never miss what you’ve never had” might be good advice to pass on to your children, but could be disastrous if followed by a business owner. Almost every demo I give to a Turbo Lister user starts with “Turbo Lister is all I need”, but invariably I’m able to find at least a few features that make them sit up and take notice. Take a look at the following features and see if there isn’t something that could help your business.
Order Processing Features
Turbo Lister has features to help you list items, but that is really just a small part of your overall business. Once an item sells, you need to communicate with your buyers, print postage, purchase insurance, leave feedback, etc. Keeping track of this can be time-consuming but SixBit is here to help. Here are some our order processing features.
Automatic Feedbacks
SixBit allows you to set up automatic feedbacks to be sent once the item has shipped. You can specify a specific message or choose to send a random message from your list of feedback messages.
Automatic Emails
Invoices, Payment Acknowledgements, Shipping Notifications, and Feedback Requests can all be sent automatically if desired.
Packing Lists
To ensure more accurate shipments and to provide detailed package information to your buyers, packing lists can be printed and included with each shipment. This also helps make your business look more professional.
Pick Lists
When processing large numbers of orders from various warehouse locations, a pick list can be printed to help find and pick all the items for the days shipments.
Create and Process Manual Orders
Non-eBay orders can easily be added and processed alongside your daily eBay orders.
Print Inventory or Listing Labels
Ensure proper item identification by printing inventory or listing labels and sticking them directly on your items. This helps eliminate shipping errors.
Print Postage (USPS), Carrier Labels (UPS and FedEx) and Mailing Labels
Integrate your postage process by printing USPS postage directly from SixBit (through Endicia). Carrier Labels for UPS and FedEx can also be printed through an integration with UPS Worldship and ShipRush for FedEx. In cases where your postage is already taken care of, simple mailing labels can be printed.
Purchase Discounted Shipping Insurance
Discounted shipping insurance can be easily purchased as you process your orders.
Print SCAN Forms
SCAN forms make it easy to drop off large numbers of packages at the Post Office. By using a SCAN form, one single barcode swipe by the postal clerk is all it takes to drop off multiple packages.
Enhanced Item and Listing Features
In addition to adding order processing features, SixBit also improves upon Turbo Lister’s item creation and listing process with the following features.
Built-in Picture Editor and Processing
A built-in Picture Editor makes it easy to rotate, resize, crop, watermark, annotate, adjust hue, saturation, brightness and contrast or even capture pictures directly from a webcam or scanner. You can even specify automatic processing that would occur to pictures as they are added to SixBit. For example, every picture that is added can be automatically resized to 1600 pixels wide, compressed, and have a watermark added.
Improved HTML Editor
SixBit includes an advanced HTML editor with all the features of the Turbo Lister editor plus the following: loading/saving to file, paste from Word, inline spell checking, search, insert image, table builder, insert special characters, strikethrough, superscript, and subscript. In addition, any information from your item or custom field information can be included dynamically using our Field Variables feature.
Improved Grids
In Turbo Lister, the main items grid allows you to resize or resort the columns, but it doesn’t keep the changes. SixBit’s grids allow for resizing, sorting, reordering, hiding/showing, grouping, or filtering and all changes can be saved. In addition, you can save multiple grid layouts for different purposes. For example you might save a layout with a particular set of fields when you are creating items and a separate layout with a different set of fields when you are looking at your inventory. We adapt to your way of doing business.
Custom Fields
No two people on eBay sell the same way, and SixBit is designed to adapt to the way you work. Custom fields in SixBit allow you to create fields to store the data that is important for your business. That data can then be shown anywhere you need it including the grids, item descriptions, emails, packing lists, pick lists, inventory labels, etc.
Free Scheduled Listings
With SixBit you can schedule listings to start at a future date without having to pay any eBay fees. Since SixBit is an application that runs on your computer, it can also sit and wait until an appointed time and then list the item for you. If you are currently paying for scheduled listings, those fees could go away.
Inventory Management
Users who have multiple copies of an item can make use of our inventory management features to keep track of how many of each item are left. In addition, reports on the success ratios and average selling price can be shown for inventory items. If you’ve ever listed more items than you’ve had on hand or wondered if you are really making any money on an item, then you will understand the importance of good inventory management features.
Batch Editing
Everything in SixBit is designed to make editing and listing items faster. Our Batch Edit feature not only allows for batch editing of multiple items at the same time, but also batch editing of running listings, inventory, orders, shipments, sales, suppliers, or buyers.
Improved Import/Export
Turbo Lister allows for the import or export of item information via CSV, however, it is a predefined CSV format. Anything you are going to use it for has to adapt to that format. SixBit allows for the import or export of data in any format you have available. For example, when importing you simply need to map the fields from your import file to the fields in SixBit and then save the mapping for future use. SixBit also supports importing items via XML.
Furthermore, you can also import/export any other type of data including: Inventory, Suppliers, Buyers, Orders, Shipments, Sales and Compatibility Sets.
Answer Buyer Questions with Predefined Replies
Easily answer all of your buyers’ questions from a single window. You can even store replies to common questions so they can be quickly retrieved.
Bulk Revise Listings
Changes can be made to multiple listings all at the same time with a few clicks.
Add to Descriptions on Running Listings
Information can also be added to multiple running listings at the same time. This is useful to tell buyers about unexpected circumstances that may require you to be away from your business for a few days.
Advanced Features
As your business grows, you may want to take advantage of some of our advanced features.
Manage Multiple Sellerids
If you list under multiple sellerids, all listing and sales can be managed from a single database.
Assign Employee Accounts Each with Different Permissions
If you are large enough to have employees, you can create SixBit accounts for each employee and restrict the data and features they have access to.
Reporting and Analysis Tools
Business decisions are best made when the proper data is available. SixBit provides the ability to print Profit and Loss, Sales Tax, and Inventory reports. The Enterprise Edition also comes with a set of Analysis Tools that will let you create your own reports on Items, Listings, Orders, Shipments, Sales, Buyers, and Suppliers.
Drop Shipping Module
With the Drop Shipping module sales information can automatically be sent to suppliers eliminating an unnecessary step in the process and improving the shipping times.
Consignment Module
If you sell items for other people on consignment you know how hard it can be to keep track of all the billing. With the SixBit Consignment Module, you simply create consignment plans that identify how you charge your consignees, then assign those plans to your items. At any time after your item sells, you can create Consignor Payout reports for your consignees detailing the sales and how much you owe them.
Reliability
TL uses an outdated, proprietary database format that is not good at handling large amounts of data. This database functionality has remained virtually unchanged since TL was initially released.
SixBit is built upon Microsoft’s SQL Server. SQL Server is the same database application used by large enterprises and corporations and has years of testing and improvements behind it. When new versions of SQL Server are available, SixBit is easily upgradeable.
In addition, the database in SixBit is an open database allowing users to view and integrate their data with other applications. A few thousand items are enough to cause problems for Turbo Lister. SixBit has users running efficiently with hundreds of thousands of items in their database.
Virtually all other components of Turbo Lister such as the grid and HTML editor are outdated as well and have remained unchanged for years. SixBit incorporates the latest technologies and components in our unending quest to remain up to date with the current technologies.
Your business deserves a reliable selling tool.
Doesn’t Hold Your Business Back
Turbo Lister is fine for sellers who only list a few items, but growing businesses soon run into some serious limitations. In addition to the database issues that occur after a few thousand items have been entered, Turbo Lister is still only designed to list items. Saving time listing items is important, but recording and processing sales are equally important and equally time consuming. Turbo Lister has virtually no features to help save time once the item has been listed to eBay.
SixBit is designed to save time throughout the entire selling process. In addition to all the time-saving listing features, SixBit will also save you time processing orders. We’ll dig into this a little bit more later on when we discuss the features of SixBit.
SixBit is also available in 3 different versions. Home and Hobby, Small Business, and Enterprise Editions let you choose the version that’s right for you. As your business grows, moving to the next level of functionality is as easy as flipping a switch. Whether you are adding another seller account, hiring your first employee, starting to sell on consignment, or starting to use a drop shipper, you can easily unlock new functionality in SixBit so your business doesn’t miss a beat.
Support
SixBit is a team dedicated to the single purpose of providing and supporting the best selling tool possible. Our world-class support team is dedicated to helping users and when your business is in trouble, we take it seriously. A Support Ticketing System, online discussion board, remote session, and database uploads are all tools we can implement to get your problem fixed as quickly as possible.
Summary
If you are a casual seller who only sells a few items a month for fun, then there is nothing I can say, (nor would I want) to convince you to pay for a listing tool. It just doesn’t make sense for either of us. If, however, you find that you are limited by Turbo Lister in any way, if it limits the number of items you can sell, or isn’t growing with you, then you owe it to yourself to explore the options to find the best solution for your business.
The first 30 days with SixBit are free so you really don’t have anything to lose. You can check out which version is right for you on our Pricing page.
Thanks for taking the time to check us out.
John Slocum
President
SixBit Software
