A few years ago I started using Quicken to manage my business and personal accounting.

At the time it was a great tool to manage my tiny cashflow  – I was a poor student, and delivering pizzas  for $8.50 an hour plus tips a few nights a week. I had to be ultra careful with my spending because my non-discretionary expenses must’ve been in the magnitude of 95% of my income. I had a credit card with a limit of about $1,000 and a bank account to my name.

Back then, the thing that peeved me off was the amount of manual labour involved in keeping the various account transactions up to date. Certainly I made it harder for myself by tracking even petty cash, but the banks had virtually no support for automated synchronization. Once I graduated from my course and started earning enough not to worry about financial implosion, I gladly laid my Quicken data to rest.

Fast forward 4 years and i’m starting to think in terms of buying a house, new car, and even live and work abroad.

So I had a look at a nifty web service called Buxfer. I was quickly impressed at the simple, application-like interface, and even more impressed at the promised synchronization with my actual banking data. Within minutes I had an account up and running. Not surprisingly, none of my Australian financial institutions were listed in the supported banks, but then I discovered a Firefox addon that supposedly would retrieve my data in a semi-automated way.

Cool! Or so I thought. But alas, as it turns out, the addon is not capable of logging in and retrieving any of my banking data. And its not really surprising, given the mine field of javascript and security precautions the banking sites have… Read more

Following the recent article on No Reserve Auctions:

On the other hand you could list an auction starting at $1 with a reserve of $20, and until a bid matches $20 or more, the item will not sell. In Thomas Multimedia’s auction platform, the reserve price is hidden from the buyer – in other words they have to stab in the dark until they find the starting price.

However once the reserve price is matched or exceeded, the current bid will stand at the reserve price. In other words, if Joe placed a bid of $100 on an item with a $50 reserve, his bid effectively would stand at $50, and provided no-one else bids, he would win the item for $50.

If however a second bidder entered the bidding, the system would automatically place a bid on Joe’s behalf all the way up to $100.

About 11.3 million Australians use the internet. Ninety per cent of them are aged 18 to 44 – that is, consumers in their prime.

According to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the internet is now the most trusted media source in the country. Ninety-five per cent of small-medium companies use the internet.
source

Is your business maximizing its online presense through a website or web software that would allow you to work more efficiently?

Along with a host of tweaks to improve the accuracy of search results, TM Auctions search pages now suggest categories based on the entered keywords.

This is a great way to get buyers looking in the right section right off the bat. Click on the image below for an enlarged version.

“More than 13 million Australians have access to the internet, and online consumer sales are expected to grow by some 24 per cent annually with predictions of over $30 billion in 2011.”

This article quotes some research indicating that online shopping is set to grow exponentially over the next few years -  the indications for Australia at least are that age and location are proving no barrier to purchasing online – what a good time to start up your own e-commerce auction site!

This post in the first in a series of tips we will be publishing to give web auction site owners and auctioneers some pointers to making their auction site a success. Whether you use our web auction software TM Auctions or another web auction platform, the first hurdle is always engaging your buying audience.

No Reserve auctions, particularly $1 No Reserve auctions are a simple concept – the auction has a pre-determined minimum bid, and any bid matching or exceeding that minimum bid will result in a sale. So if you start an auction with a minimum bid of $1, and only one bid is placed, the item will sell for $1.

You might think this is a huge risk on the part of the seller, but its much more of a calculated risk. Obviously you should avoid listing something you think you would lose money on. So does that mean you should list junk items in the hope of gaining some feedback/reputation? No!

In fact the No Reserve $1 category should contain only quality items. Just take a look at the items listed in this $1 No Reserve category. Any day of the week, we can confidently say that the more expensive looking items will attract the most bids – whereas the cheap stuff is probably rotating without a single bid.

Not only do quality no reserve auctions receive the most bids and deliver the most profit to the seller, but they increase the site’s popularity. If you put on your buying hat, would you be comfortable bidding $1 or $100 on your very first bid? Buyers will often test the waters in no reserve, and quickly gain confidence with the system and with the sellers.

See also our article on Reserve Auctions.

If you have never picked up a hammer, would you build your own house?

Having worked in the web industry for the last 5 years or so,  I always get a laugh at the DIY website building crowd – that is, people who have no real experience or knowledge in web design, development and web marketing.

I don’t know about you but I would love to have a dollar for every time I have heard “my cousin John can build websites”.

Sure there are dozens of tools that are designed to empower non-technical people into being able to publish their own content – in fact that is the aim of my online auction software and other excellent systems like WordPress. So I don’t mean to create a barrier to entry that non-technical people cannot contribute and thrive online – just don’t try and build the system!

For those who think that they can produce something adequate based on their desktop publishing skills alone (such as Word, Powerpoint) – please consider that the web industry is easily as involved as any other profession, and only true experience can produce results.

In fact I would argue it is more involved that many professions, based on the rate of change, and the vast array of technologies to grasp.

Here is a simple test – if you don’t know the meaning of any term on this list, don’t build a professional website:

• HTML
• CSS
• standards compliance
• FTP
• SEO
• Server side code
• Client side code

Believe me, this is the tip of the iceberg – the list will double in size as soon as you want a functional website.

Give your business / idea a real shot at success by employing the services of a web professional.

You’ve probably already heard the famous quote by Benjamin Franklin:

“The only things certain in life are death and taxes”

On this bombshell, we decided we better introduce some taxation controls into our web auction software, TM Auctions.  From the seller settings page, sellers can now choose whether to apply tax to buyers in the same country, and enter the applicable percentage rate. The tax component will then be added onto the order value.

This new feature will work nicely with the vast majority of international taxation systems such as VAT and GST.

TM Auctions now supports bulk shipping discounts that can be set by the seller.

The discounts can be set either on the order quantity or order total. In other words, if the order total is greater than $x, the seller can have a fixed shipping cost of $y -  OR -  if the number of items in the order is greater than x items, the shipping cost can be fixed to $y.

This is a big advantage particularly for high volume sellers who wish to offer their loyal customers a shipping incentive.

Thomas Multimedia is pleased to announce the official launch of our web auction software, TM Auctions.

Why did I build TM Auctions? Because their is an abysmal lack of easy to use auction software for every day business. It seems like everyone else is focused on feature on top of feature, slapping on a price tag and mass releasing their software, and leaving it to their customers to figure out the rest.

I thought to myself – why not offer web auction software as a service? What this means is that Thomas Multimedia takes care of the technical aspects – hosting, server maintanence, scaling issues – while the auction site owner can focus on what matters to them, building up an online auction community.

Besides the lack of availability of a true auction website service, I think i’m not alone in thinking online auctions are alot of fun. It’s a win-win for the buyer and seller. The buyer bids only as much as they want to bid, potentially saving big bucks compared to traditional retail buying, while the seller sets a minimum acceptable selling price with the potential for a bidding war and healthy profitibaility from the sale.

Our product is designed with a wealth of auction site production experience to learn from. We figured people really like to use web software that is easy to use and does the things an auction site should do, without bloating the whole process with a million seldom used functions, and buttons left right and center. As well as being able to customize your TM Auctions auction site design however you like, you can also have us customize it in all sorts of ways for you.

Sounds great – but what about the pricing? TM Auctions removes the big barrier… Read more