There have been a few discussions in the past about auction scripts, but none too recent that I’ve spotted, so I thought I’d take a punt and ask the question again to the community.
A (big) client of ours wants to sell large used mining/construction equipment on their website via auction. AFIAK they want to be the only ones able to sell (i.e. not a ‘reverse auction’ site - I think that’s the correct terminology).
Price is not really a factor. They want to pay for professional off-the-shelf auction software, or have us (professional LAMP developers) develop a simple system for them.
Can anyone give any first hand comparisons of either ilance or phpprobid (or can convince me to consider another)? Service? Support? Customisable? Stable?
As a very dissatisfied “customer” of iLance, I’d say, go with phpprobid. iLance is so buggy as to be completely useless. The owner is not terribly responsive, either.
Search for yourself - find ONE successful site powered by iLance. you won’t find it, because it doesn’t exist.
Who are you exactly? what is your Full Name? If you are a customer of ILance then you won’t have a problem providing that info via PM or publically. What is more, it’s funny that you show up here on such a popular forum with only 2 posts to your name talking about how ILance customers don’t exist. Are we suppose to suck that up and blow out bubbles? LOL
Do My Stuff is doing pretty well for themselves using ILance as a framework for their business. So well in fact that they have been featured on Prime Time News (Fox and CNN Business Hour).
ILance is a serious solution for the serious customer. That’s why it cost more. It actually works. Our customers come to ILance when they’ve depleted all other resources because when you buy a $49 script you get $49 worth of results. Trust me, I love great deals too but when I buy cheap products I always receive cheap results.
How exactly is ILance is different?
We know what it takes to write good solid code and software that is scalable and can be extended as seen fit (example, the designer who will update and manage the html templates, the programmer who will handle the php code in functions stored in proper classes and for the business owner who wants to know how much revenue he’s pulled in today, yesterday and last year for that matter).
ILance works if you’re a serious customer or have a serious business plan with some money to invest and we support ALL our customers.
Hi Peter. I took a look at iLance for a web site client of mine looking to do work in the music industry to put up products and other items for a specific niche. There is no question that a good amount of work was put into creating the script.
Unfortunately did not have a good experience in the forums when asking presales questions, especially about the licensing costs. I got hammered by people talking about “serious investors.” These people are. The problem I had is that if you have just a small site, you’re going to have to pay $2,000 for the basic script. Getting 15,000 registrations is easy but most of the time the majority of accounts won’t be used unless someone has something to sell. Many accounts will be dormant and have to be there for people to come back 6 months later. Right now I have a site that I’m looking to implement this kind of script. Unless you’re starting from scratch to create an ebay clone, any existing niche site has to spend $2,000 to see how iLance may work for them. It’s an understandable issue and it’s the same whether you have $500 or $50,000 to invest.
To be honest Peter, Do My Stuff doesn’t seem to be very popular. Sure it may have received press at one time but he metrics now are very poor. I just looked at available jobs and I think there are 54 listed. This doesn’t give me a great deal of confidence.
Right now I’m looking at purchasing a different script which costs half the price of your basic for unlimited users and gets the job done for me. In fairness, phprobids only has product bids but usually this is sufficient. I would have been happy to consider working with you for our community but at this time I’ve heard the same position you’ve had before… and in this economy, it’s even tougher for any investor.
I know this thread is pretty old, but curious about the outcome. Did anyone find any auction software they liked?
I’m looking for something that’s service-oriented, and need to add some of my own code (mostly streaming audio/video), would love to hear any success stories.
Just to let you know that (way back then) we gave ilance a bit of a trial go, but the client got distracted on moved onto other things. So don’t really have much value to add I’m afraid
I’m sure that people at i*ance are good programmers but they simply dont spend enough time testing their marketplace sw. it contains a lot of bugs - even such bugs that do not allow you to show the website to the public…
i have to admit that the first bugs found were fixed very quickly but you’ll get frustrated at some point in time while testing every function. now they dont even reply to questions or open issues…
well, if I could i would return the sw and get my money back.
BUT, if the sw were stable and free of bugs it would be the best sw for this purpose on the market (and I checked a lot of them in this price class).
if you are a hacker and like to script and fix bugs, go ahead and use i*ance - you’ll be very happy with it.
If you just want to buy sw, customize it and open the marketplace you’ll be better off looking for other options.
burns, thanks a lot for your information. how long ago did you use it? i noticed that ilance has been version 3 for many years so i dont know that so much has changed.
what do you mean by not being able to show your site? i am worried about the payment options not working because you cant test them on the site. there is also a lot of funky stuff going on int he header which i cant imagine anyone would want to display it in a demo. sometimes it’s fixed width and others its variable. really strange.
now the software is 3.8 i think. i wnated to see if it is table but there is no access to forums. the front stuff is totally empty and nobody posts. there might be a client area hidden but if nobody is in the front part then nobody is in the back. none of their members are active any more and i cant find one site that is even running. that is a really bad sign and not worth a gamble for so much money. it’s almost 500 bucks just to find out and you will pay a lot more soon when the members fill up.
Well, I use the latest version which is 3.1.8 but since I want to offer the service for free i’ve disabled all the accounting and billing stuff. I’m pretty sure that there are also some things which need to be fixed in order to use the full potential of the payment methods, if they tested it the way they tested other things…
They are not like other companies which tend to add new functionality instead of fixing bugs and create a complete stable software package. But thats the way it is, they always want to be one footstep ahead of their competitors. Big players, and I mean such as ora…e, s.p also offer a complete e-procurement solution - at such rates with which you could retire - but you can’t use it if you do not apply at least 5 hotfix packages and hire a consultant for customizing the solution. but that’s a different league…
If you are not familiar with php programming, basic webdesign and mysql then you better use another software - which will of course not offer all the features but “should” be bug free. The less functionality, the less testing required, the less bugs - that’s my experience.
Another thing is the price for the sw:
500 $ is a reasonable price but I would have expected less bug, a lot less bugs. Especially things like security (https) support which is imho a “must have” for such sites. I would never register on a site with no or an invalid certificate. But if 500$ is alot in your opinion, then I’ll give you a few thoughts to this:
you need a lawyer which checks your site and writes the terms and conditions for you - costs: at least 2000$
you need to hire a professional webdesigner to create flyers, ads, for your website - costs: at least 1000$
you need to advertise for your site, for instance in magazines, on the web, radio … otherwise nobody will even know that your site exists and use it - costs: starting at 500$ to unlimited$
All in all you need at least 5000$ (even more if you need to hire someone to fix bugs and customize your site) to start your business. If you really want to do a professional site, otherwise nobody will use it…
What I want to say is that you need a business plan and do some research before you start to develop a website, no matter which sw you’ll use in the end.
But for ilance… as i said before, either you are a developer and can fix, customize your webpage or you check another sw which is “bug free”…
@mrburns: thanks for the detailed information but you should always make sure to have a demo version and do your tests before actually buying it. I would not buy anything before testing the product.
But now a few of my findings regarding ilance software, although I cannot proof it but I am 90 percent sure that it works like this.
They just use a simple trick to generate traffic on their forums and suggest to users that their are a lot of licenced members using their software.
It works like this (you can try it by yourself if you plan to open a discussion board or sell a non prod ready software):
Find a topic that is of interest for many users
find a lot of friends/relatives that will support you
create a forum
add a few users
just start threads with different users and reply as forum moderator or any other user
register other users on a daily/weekly basis and start threads
This will suggest that their’s activity in the forum and search bots start to index your page. The more threads/messages/answers you generate the more often the bot visits your site - this in turn will increase your page rank.
As I said, there is no proof of that theory but I am sure that only a hand full of people try to get this defective software up and running and the rest are just fake threads/messages…
If any of you guys have real experience using the software I’d really like to hear it, not guessing. However you do make a good point. The ilance forums are totally empty and I mean nothing there. Even if there were a few posts it seems that nobody has any sites up. Search yahoo or google and every site is not active, even ones with design work done. What scares me about buying ilance is that even the site they are pushing (domystuff.com) looks deserted. If that is the best you can do then it scares me what the average site looks like. I mean like not even one site to show? Bad sign.
Anyone using it? I would appreciate a pm if you are just to confirm my thoughts.
You’re seeing an empty forum because you are not licensed and haven’t purchased any ILance products. ILance does not entertain public chit chat. It’s a support only forum.
That has absolutely nothing to do with purchasing Software IMO. What people do with their web site is not up to ILance FYI. Deserted or not, ILance is the only vendor in this market who has created a total marketplace solution.
BTW, you should know that in order to bring traffic you need to promote and spend money. People don’t have the kind of money to advertise like big corporations. But they try and sometimes it takes a long time to get a business going on limited resources.
Some food for thought: 90% of our customers purchase branding removal. Half of those customers are auctioning off their arts and crafts and other items in their local towns/cities. You will experience these sites when they are promoted to you. Furthermore, we do not unveil our customers because we respect their privacy. It’s a don’t ask don’t tell relationship if you will
ILance software does exactly what it should, it was written and designed to earn revenue for bidding on and/or posting auctions (along with 10+ major income generating streams built-in) and if you’re not in the cockpit controling your ship there is nobody to blame but yourself.
What is more - to this day DMS is still using ILance Software and as far as I’m concerned 2+ years using an outdated version of ILance framework should tell you something about it’s developers and makers of the product: It’s tight and it works excellent! (and even made it look they want they wanted 110%) just compare that site to the iLance Demo …
Sigh
You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you who has bought ILance since 2002. We’re small team but we’re the best when it comes to auction software. Hands down. You won’t find anything more put together than ILance.
So if you want to be the best, you got to get the best (and then of course you can make it even BETTER). ILance is the professional choice. How you market your business is entirely up to YOU!!
You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you who has bought ILance since 2002. We’re small team but we’re the best when it comes to auction software. Hands down. You won’t find anything more put together than ILance.
If ilance has been selling since 2002, how can the number of successful ilance sites known to the public be zero? Even the competition which you claim sucks has at least 3 sites to show. Maybe you convinced a friend at Adobe or Apple to buy a copy of ilance and you include them as a customer. I found a bunch of ilance sites that are branded and brand free and they all have zero activity. Can’t find one customer says great things about it yet and has a good site. Many say the same thing that it is very buggy. I was really hoping to find some evidence of success but just can’t find any.
I just told you above we don’t discuss our customers in public. I apologize if this is unsettling to you.
This is what every site owner deals with. Nobody excluded. You claim to be above “Newbie” status in other threads you write (which you clearly state) and you don’t know this??
Now you found ILance and you think your crap is going to work with me?
As far as I’m concerned, you have no credibility nor offer any value to the original posters topic. Here’s some advice: move on before you dig your hole even deeper.
You don’t have to discuss your customers in public. I have never heard of any script or software that couldn’t show even one customer who was able to use the software successfully. The one customer you did feature you say was on major television networks and had significant publicity. How come that site is completely dead? Your company shows absolutely no activity anywhere. Maybe a person here and there might buy the script without doing research. But what I am asking are all reasonable questions that any potential customer would ask as have others here.
Now you found ILance and you think your crap is going to work with me?
I absolutely have the right to state my customer experience and I am not surprised that I am not the only person with the same. I have the crazy emails and other people have seen them. But as much as I think the owner is someone to never do business with and guy who posted here’s site has failed miserably, the script does show 2 sites that seem to show some functionality. I think it would be extremely hard to succeed with that script and not worth the money but at least 2 sites show that the script functions.
I haven’t bashed you at all. You are just getting very mad and very defensive because you have been asked reasonable questions and haven’t said anything. You imply many customers who are happy but you just can’t even point to one after 8 years of doing business. And when they don’t succeed, you say that it’s always the customer’s fault for the lack of success.
As far as I’m concerned, you have no credibility nor offer any value to the original posters topic. Here’s some advice: move on before you dig your hole even deeper.
You’re the one selling something and asking for people to spend a lot of money and believe you. This thread is here and started by people other than myself because you haven’t earned any credibility.
As far as the value of my posts, I’m not selling anything. I’ve asked the same questions I see everywhere else. Is anybody on the planet willing to show they have one successful iLance site? The developers can’t show even one or two sites after 8 years? I don’t have to explain. The facts speak for themselves until someone shows us differently.
I purchase the ilance script a year ago but have not got time to work on the site since i got a lot of other distractions. I would like to transfer the ilance license to someone who would be interested in using it. It is a great script, I have played a little with it, a lot of features. The license for the marketplace is $497 and the add-on message board script lanceBB cost $49, I also has the white label license I think. Total cost was $546 for me. Now I am giving it away for $246, so that you have $300 savings. I have the download for the lastest version 3.1.9 which is released on Nov. 4, 2009 (today).
Contact me through private messaging is you want it. Serious inquery only. you will pay me by Paypal, then I will give you login to ilance client area, where you can find support and access to forum etc.
You have absolutely no permission to perform this sale on software that is copyright in full by ILANCE INC. Failure to do so will render your license null and void without further support and download on any ILance product now or the future.
I didn’t read that part, I simply tried the demo and purchased the script.
Don’t assume everyone is knowingly violating rules… I am one of the customers who just liked a product and bought it. Saw the listings on sitepoint under “script and software for sale”, thought of the Ilance script i purchased and currently not using…
It’s not a problem but the fact remains if you are a customer of ILance Inc. you would have had to sign the EULA agreement which you had to fax back to ILance HQ before you gained any access to download.
What’s your ILance username BTW? PM me. Stores is almost ready for release and I’d be more than happy to introduce to you this new product including Wanted Ads and Warnings system.
I think you’ll really enjoy what is coming up very soon. We’re listening and working with our customers very closely.
Good to know that if you don’t like the script, you can’t even sell it. For that kind of money I wouldn’t want to be stuck with it forever or lose it. If the guy wants to sell his script I can’t understand why you’re trying to upsell him another product. Maybe because he is stuck with it forever.
We are all still waiting for anyone to come up with a web site or two which uses ilance to some degree of success. All we keep seeing are people who want to sell it. Is this coincidence? Don’t need to make this thread longer. Until we see signs of credibility there unfortunately is no credibility in ilance as a real world relatively bug free solution.
just compare that site to the iLance Demo …
