It's easier to give

Feedback: we all love to get it (the positive kind, anyway). But leaving it can rapidly become a chore. How many A+++s do you want to cut and paste in one lifetime anyway? That's where Merlin Instant Feedback can help.

Instant Feedback can work in one of two ways, according to the way you like to leave feedback. It can automatically check your feedback and post positives for those who have left them for you, choosing from a selection of comments you input. It will also warn, via a heart-stopping screen pop-up, of negative and neutral feedback. If there are those for whom you don't want to leave any feedback - troublesome buyers, or those strange people who request no feedback - they can be added to a 'blacklist' and ignored.

Alternatively, manual feedback functions allow you to select from items paid for over a set period of time, either to leave them feedback or to email buyers asking them to leave it for you.

IF is unique in being a stand-alone feedback processor: all other similar products that I know of come as part of an auction management bundle, which are often costly, may not suit the way you run your particular business, and probably have a fairly steep learning curve. You can be up and leaving comments with IF in just a few minutes. And at just US$19.95 to download, it's money well spent.

Developer Jason Novak told me that there are more than a thousand eBayers currently using the software. Leaving feedback manually would take me on average twenty minutes a day, so in the two years I've been using it, that's ten whole days that Instant Feedback has given me back. Life really is too short to spend it pasting feedback.