eBay problems
eBay is aimed towards people selling things to each other. It was built around reselling of second hand objects and that initial design decision has meant it is quite awkward for companies to operate as an eBay seller. You will know that giving out your eBay username and password is a very dangerous thing to do unless you trust the person you give it to. And if that's dangerous, then giving out the PayPal details is just asking for trouble.
Atemis tries to deal with these problems by using the eBay Web Services API. This is a way to communicate with eBay without having to login directly to their site. You effectively tell your Atemis installation what to do, and it tells eBay. This means you do not give access to your employees to aspects of eBay you would rather not give them access to. As your business grows, this will become invaluable, if you ever intend to take a holiday again.
eBay is fantastic at what it does, but it lacks so many features. But fortunately for us, eBay decided that rather than anticipate every need, they will simply make the data it has available to us in a computer friendly format, which is how Atemis can do all these things. It is not a "hack", it is perfectly acceptable. You can find out more about the eBay API at http://developer.ebay.com
We can therefore provide you with proper customer relationship management tools (CRM) that eBay is unable to do. We can also give you a separate website, and allow the stock control to be used for sales from either eBay or your own site.
You may question having your own website, but with one, you can reduce your costs, and therefore sell your goods at a lower price on your own site. Once a customer comes to you rather than eBay then you have no competition to worry about. You will also be better off if there is a problem with eBay that keeps you from making money for considerable period of time. Although it is highly unlikely that eBay would go off-line for a long period of time, there are no guarentees.