Wonder Lister: The Must-Have Tool For High-Volume eBay Sellers

Picture this: you’re a marketplace seller, you have thousands of different products, and all of a sudden your most popular brand changes its name, meaning you need to edit all of your listings.

If you sell on eBay, this scenario could cause you all kinds of problems. Unlike Amazon, where the catalog reigns supreme, on eBay you’re responsible for the content of all of your listings. That’s okay if you only have a few, but if you have thousands then finding the right ones and changing them accurately can be a massive undertaking… Unless, of course, you are using Wonder Lister.

Wonder Lister is an eBay selling tool with a huge number of useful features, including a very fast and flexible bulk editing system. It allows you to search all of your active eBay listings, find the ones that need changing, and edit them all at once, from a desktop app.

An eBay management tool is a must-have for large sellers. For just $5 per month, Wonder Lister allows up to 500 active listings. At that price, it supports one eBay account and one eBay site, but the higher-level plans support unlimited eBay accounts and listing to all of eBay’s global marketplaces.

Where did Wonder Lister come from?

The story starts in 2003, when Wonder Lister’s founder, Chavi Rastogi, began working at eBay. In his role managing various seller tools and customer support, Chavi had direct contact with sellers using Turbo Lister, ProStores and Selling Manager, and also dealt with hundreds of sellers who used and loved Blackthorne – all tools which have since been retired by eBay.

Chavi left eBay with a vast amount of knowledge in the ecommerce area. The trend at the time was away from desktop tools, but from experience he knew that many sellers preferred them over cloud-based software. Sellers were in fact lamenting the lack of a high performance, desktop-based listing tool.

In 2014 Chavi launched Wonder Lister, a desktop tool for selling on eBay that sellers could download and run on their computers. In the years since it has evolved a great deal, and become much more than just a replacement for eBay’s former selling tools.

Features

Wonder Lister has so many features that we can’t cover them all here. Instead we’ve picked out four that give sellers a big helping hand.

Bulk Editing

One of the features that Wonder Lister is best known for is its bulk editing capability. This function allows high-volume sellers to make adjustments to some or all of their listings, in just a few clicks.

This feature becomes crucial whenever eBay changes their policies. A recent example is when eBay went to full HTTPS, meaning that sellers had to switch all their content (such as images) from HTTP to HTTPS. A seller with thousands of listings can’t simply edit them one at a time!

With Wonder Lister, sellers can do a find and replace search on all of their listings, changing every instance of “http” to “https”. Sellers can make the changes and have compliant listings live on eBay quickly, and without any hassle.

Listing Editor

The way Wonder Lister allows users to edit their listings is quick and efficient. You can click on a row and edit the data in a panel on the right, that shows the most commonly edited fields and offers a big time saving over having to double click each listing to edit in a separate window.

When you have thousands of listings, it can be hard to find the ones you want. But, by allowing you to put listings into folders, and with its advanced search feature, Wonder Lister makes it simple. You can just click a folder, or enter a search term, and all the matching listings appear.

Sellers can also duplicate listings from the listing editor. So, if they sell the same product in the US, the UK and Australia, they can create one listing then duplicate it as many times as they need. Duplicated listings can be edited as usual then submitted to eBay.

When you duplicate a listing, you can select what information you copy. For example, if you don’t want the listings to have the same title or description, then the duplicate listing won’t copy that information from the source listing.

Consignment Selling

If your business model is based around consignment selling, where you sell items for other people, then Wonder Lister has all the tools you need to manage it smoothly. It streamlines the process, cutting out the need for multiple spreadsheets or writing out statements manually.

For consignment sellers, Wonder Lister has a customer database and the ability to set up different commission types. Then, when you create a listing, you pick the consignor that the item belongs to, and select which commission calculation should be used.

When the product sells, you can run off a report which details the products that the consignor gave you, how much they sold for, how much your commission was, and the final amount that they will receive.

Data Export

Often, Wonder Lister users are multi-channel sellers, so they don’t just sell on eBay. Wonder Lister lets them export their listings to a CSV file that can be imported into other marketplaces, such as Amazon, without making any significant changes.

All the user has to do is create a data mapping, with all the required fields, named correctly for the target marketplace. So for example, if you want to export to Amazon, you’ll need to create a template that has a field for “product title” instead of “title”. The first time you do this, it’s a good idea to download Amazon’s template and copy the headings in from there.

Once the data export mapping has been set up in Wonder Lister it is saved and can be used again and again.

Import data from vendor CSV files

Wonder Lister allows you to map vendor-supplied CSV file to Wonder Lister’s CSV fields

You can create an unlimited number of CSV mappings. These mappings are created and saved just once and can then be reused subsequently. This allows you to create your listings directly using your vendor’s CSV files rather than making major edits to each individual vendor’s CSV file.

What benefits does a desktop app have?

There are a number of reasons why some sellers prefer desktop apps to cloud-based solutions, with the primary one being performance. Despite internet speeds increasing dramatically in recent years, when it comes to managing large volumes of data, cloud-based apps still don’t compare to running applications locally, on your own computer.

On a similar note, cloud-based solutions require constant internet access – desktop apps don’t. This means that you can use Wonder Lister on the go, or in places with slow or non-existent internet connections, and simply push the changes to eBay later on.

Aside from performance and connectivity, sellers also like the idea of having their data locally, on their own computer. It gives them the opportunity to use this data elsewhere, either by integrating with their other systems, or using it on their own website. It also protects their privacy and security, as the data does not need to be stored on third-party servers.

Wonder Lister has a built-in automatic backup facility, so listing data and preferences are not lost if a laptop is stolen or breaks down. Sellers can restore all their information easily and get back to work quickly.

Wonder Lister as a Turbo Lister replacement

When Turbo Lister was retired in June 2017, many sellers started using Wonder Lister, as the two have very similar characteristics, not least that they can both be used without an internet connection. Wonder Lister’s grid format may also appeal to sellers who liked the spreadsheet approach of Turbo Lister.

If you previously used Turbo Lister, it is easy to get started with Wonder Lister. When you first use it, Wonder Lister can automatically import all of your live eBay listings. You can export any additional listing templates from Turbo Lister, and import that file into Wonder Lister. This makes the templates available for use in Wonder Lister.

Wonder Lister’s user interface is highly configurable so can be modified to meet each seller’s individual needs and working practices. It can’t be made to exactly match Turbo Lister, as Wonder Lister has many more features, but there is complete freedom to personalize which listing fields are shown and more.

An eBay seller’s Swiss army knife

Wonder Lister is a very feature-rich tool for high-volume eBay sellers, and is set to become even more powerful over the coming months and years.

Try Wonder Lister free for 15 days and see the features for yourself

This post was sponsored by Wonder Lister. It was originally published in April 2018, and last updated in September 2020.