Welcome to the Honesty Walk-through. The purpose of this page is to help you to use our services to their full capacity. In order to follow along more easily, you may want to open a second browser window by clicking here. Now you can read this walk-through in one window and navigate through our site in the other window. We hope that by the time you are done reading, you will find our site not only more useful, but very user friendly and easy to navigate. If you can't find what you're looking for here, you can also check our Frequently Asked Questions section. You can always send any and all questions, suggestions, or thoughts to support@honesty.com. We will generally get back to you within 30 minutes.
View Counters Options:
Even if you don't have any counters in place just yet, you will soon find your View Counters page to be your base of operations on our system. To start off, enter your registered email address, Honesty password, and Amazon Nickname. The Amazon Nickname only applies when viewing Amazon auctions. Your Amazon Nickname is the name you selected when you first registered with them. If you did not pick a name, then your Amazon Nickname is just the email address that you registered with Amazon. Before you click "submit", let's look at some of the other options that are available.
Auction History
This lets you see information for your closed auctions. This is useful for pulling up information on all auctions that closed while you were away from your computer. Most people use the two day setting, since they can check the last few days with getting too much old information that they don't need.
Display Settings
This is where you select the auction systems that you want to see information for. The default is to display eBay auctions, but you can select any combination that you like. For those of you wondering, a generic counter is used for web pages and other auctions sites.
Additional Options:
Font Size
This will change the overall size of all the data that gets displayed. You can pick larger text for easier reading, or smaller text for printing. Normal size works great for most users.
Printer Friendly
For those of you looking to make a hard copy of your view counters page, this option will turn off all menus, banners, and advertisements on our page. This gives you only the information you need, leaving you with a nice, clean, printable page.
Checkboxes and Sorting
These options determine what auction information is displayed on your results page. Each option can be enabled or disabled, depending on what information you want displayed. Just below these options, you are able to choose how this information is sorted when displayed.
Auto-Refresh
Our Auto-Refresh feature reloads your View Counters results page at the interval you set, so your information is kept up to the minute. The 1 or 5 minute settings usually work best, because refreshing the results more often will cause your results page to blank out and reload. Most users find it very hard to read the page when it's constantly flickering on and off.
Totals
The last two options let you decide where you would like your full summary displayed, or if you would like to display only your totals. This information includes your total number of items, total number of bids , total bid amount, etc.
Once you choose what options you want displayed, submit the form to get your auction summary!
View Counters Results:
You should now be looking at a formatted table containing all of the auctions that you are running on either eBay or Amazon. The first column in this table displays the auction item number. Each of these auction numbers are links to the respective auction, so you can click them to look at your actual auction listing. The next column displays either the item's current count, or an "Add counter" link if no counter has been added yet. If a count is shown, you can click on the link to view that counter's statistics information. On the statistics page, you can see the hourly and daily hits on that counter. If the "Add Counter" link is shown, you can click right there to add a counter (we'll cover that below).
The next few columns display the item description, current bid, and the current high bidder. There's even a link to send an email to the high bidder. Just like on the auction sites, the current bid will be bold if a bid has been placed.
From here, you can add counters to any auctions that don't already have them by clicking on the "Add Counter" shortcuts. To add counters to your listings, we need your email address, your eBay or Amazon password, and the auction item number. When you click the "Add counter" link, all your information, with the exception of your password, will be filled in for you. There are also many counter options that can be set for your counter at this point. You can change the digit style, the way your counter counts, hide your count from your bidders, etc. For a full description of these options, click on the option link. Once your counter is set up the way you want it, simply type in your password and click to submit, and your counter will be automatically added to your auction listing. Now, if you view your auction, you should see your new counter at the bottom of the listing.
Making Your Life Easier:
Now that you have an idea of the process involved, lets make it even easier! Click the "Preferences" link at the top of this page (in the dark green stripe just below our logo) to access your Honesty Preferences page. Here, you will be able to select and save just about any options that you will ever need to use our site. You can save all of your passwords, counter options, styles, etc. Any passwords that you save will be stored on your computer in a "cookie". Since your passwords are stored safely on your computer, we at Honesty have no access to your confidential auction passwords. All options aside from your passwords will be stored on our system. Once you set and submit your preferences, if you visit your view counters page, you'll skip right to the View Counters results page! No need to log in, because your cookie took care of that for you! Now, when you go to add a counter, everything, including your passwords, will be filled in for you! All you'll need to do is submit the form. This is a great timesaver for people who are running multiple auctions.
Now you may be wondering what you'll need to do if your item doesn't sell. How do you handle the counter in that case? Simple! We take care of that automatically for you. When you relist your item, just leave the old counter code exactly where it is. Some users do not want the line stating what day the counter was added, as this tells bidders that the item has been re-listed. You may modify or remove this line as you wish. This is not an issue if your item was listed using Honesty's One-Step Lister (tm), because the counter does not need to be appended to the auction listing. The first time this new item is viewed, the counter will "recycle" itself to correspond with the new item number, and the count will reset to "0" at the same time. Since this recycling does not occur until your item is viewed for the first time, you will see an "Add counter" link on your view counters page. You do not want to use this, or you will end up with two counters!
We've made our system as flexible as possible, and you can change most of your counter options after the counter has been added as well. In our services menu (upper left, remember? *smile*), click the "Counters" link, and select "Edit Counters" from there. You will see the counter options that you set when adding the counter, such as counter style, border, etc. Editing your counters is useful if you need to reset the counter back to "0" by hand, or if you want to change the digit style. Sometimes the digit style that you thought was so great just doesn't fit well with your auction when you look at it. You can change these counter settings at any time by using Edit Counters.
That's it! You should be able to navigate around our site like a pro! We are always open to suggestions, so feel free to write us if you have a suggestion or an idea that you think would be useful to online auction users. Most of our features come from user feedback, and we love to get it!
