iSale - 1.1.3

I am using iSale 5.2.1 on an iMac (3.06 GHz, 4 GB) running Mac OS X 10.5.4 "Leopard". I am a casual eBay user, selling only a few items per year.

iSale was a pretty good product years ago (back when it won two "Apple Design Awards" and received a good review from MacWorld). It worked well for me back in the day too. However, based on my experience with recent iSale updates over the past year, iSale has gone downhill.

Bugs

There are several bugs that leave me not trusting the program.

For example, the iSale editor (the part of iSale that is supposed to make attractive web pages for your auctions based on HTML templates) is pretty buggy. I found that my cursor kept jumping around at seemingly random times. Also, iSale would strip out the links of my hyperlinks (leaving just the text) when I cut-and-pasted them to different places on the page.

Even without the bugs, there is basic functionality that is missing. For example, the inability to make lists or simple tables. Overall, the editor was quite frustrating for me to use.

As another example, the "Auction List" along the left of the application is broken. I have created one auction, but every time I quit and re-start iSale a new "Auction Group" is created with either 6, 7 or 8 auctions. So, even though I have only 1 real auction, I currently have 105 auctions in 15 auction groups without the ability to delete them (the "-" button, which is supposed to let you delete an auction group, is disabled).

The "Auction List" is also supposed to help you keep your auctions organized as well as show you the "next steps" for each stage of your auction. However, these options are only shown for the "Archive" library (which is empty), and not shown at all for the "My Auctions" library.

Out of date with eBay

iSale is supposed to be a friendly interface over the often confusing (for me, anyway) and busy eBay web pages. It was the promise of an "easy interface" that originally attracted me to iSale. However, iSale appears to be programmed to an eBay circa 2006. Today's eBay (mid-2008) has either different or updated functionality that confuses iSale. I found that I had to use the eBay web site to correct mistakes made by iSale.

As a simple example of how out-of-date iSale has become with respect to eBay's current functionality, take shipping options.

iSale wouldn't submit my auction until I filled out "International Shipping Options". I didn't want to ship internationally, which is a legitimate eBay option, but iSale didn't offer this option. The workaround was to fill in bogus international shipping information into iSale so that I could submit my auction to eBay, and then use the eBay web site to correct the information (in my case selecting "No International Shipping").

Conclusion

I cannot recommend iSale. The product was good back in the day, but Equinux (the company who makes iSale) has neglected this product and appears to be riding the "two Apple Design Awards and favorable MacWorld review" positive press they received several years ago as long as they can without doing anything to fix basic bugs or keep the product fresh and up-to-date with current eBay functionality.