If you’re a Sellathon user, you’ll have noticed the changes to the Sellathon site – at least according to an email that hit my inbox this last week.

It seems things are moving apace after Auctiva acquired the company, and these have been accelerated since eBay made a number of significant changes that threatened to leave Sellathon without critical functionality. They’ve now completely reworked the code that drives Sellathon, and its ViewTracker and Gallery products, and have released Version 4, which went “live” on Sept. 18th without much fanfare.

Sellathon claim v.4 offers a similar (though not identical) feature mix as the previous version with improved scalability, reliability and a new look and feel.  For the new version, they say they’re responding to the feedback received from customers, and although it’s only six weeks since version 4 rolled, they’ve already made several changes in line with user requests and preferences -

• Returned the “New Hits” feature to the software
• Allowed users to specify their preferred Time Zone
• Changed forced logout from 1 to 24 hours
• Made Gallery work for Auctiva users (even if their Sellathon free trial has expired)
• Added multicurrency functionality

The Sellathon counter has been updated to give it a fresh look and make the hit count more reliable.  Plus, based on customer preference, the counter link now takes buyers directly to the seller’s Sellathon Most Popular Gallery page, which delivers more exposure to your listings .

Sellathon say they are listening to comments posted in their Community Forum, and to those submitted to Customer Support.   More importantly, they state they’re working hard to remedy any problems users are having, but fail to break down which ones are coming from eBay’s changes, and which ones are coming from Sellathon’s internal changes.

A minor gripe I had when looking at their site is that I could find no pointer to an affiliate advertising program.  A quick Google search revealed that you have to be a registered user of the product and from within your user account you can then sign as an affiliate.  This is similar to how MoneyBookers and PayPal operate their programs, but is extremely limiting in terms of the exposure it will drive.

Dedicated users of Sellathon will be primarily eBay sellers, and any serious eBay seller will be too busy to run off-eBay marketing campaigns of any great worth for attracting new users.  If Sellathon want to win the battle of the user-data tools, they need to be attracting people from outside the hard-core eBay seller group – bloggers and journo’s for example – in order to access the occassional and less frequent seller groups, who are far more numerous than the volume sellers.

An additional group that Sellathon could be targetting, though eBay wouldn’t like it, would be those vendors who don’t use eBay and have no intention of ever doing so.  I’m sure they would love access to the marketing data locked up in the Sellathon stats systems.  To access this, the largest etailing, group Sellathon will certainly need to open their affiliate marketing doors to a wider spread of merchants.

It appears they are mainly relying on email marketing to spread the word of Sellathon v.4  Intrinsically I have no problem with this, except … I have never had any form of account at Sellathon at any time, although I did give the Auctiva free trial a whirl about 4-5 years ago.  If the email I received recently was due to that Auctiva dabble half a decade ago, then I’m afraid it is Spam – and who wants to be associated with a company that Spam markets?

Ed