Free Facebook-powered auction application now available

Monarch Software Designs today announced the immediate availability of their Facebook-powered auction application, Monarch Market. The free service allows anyone with a Facebook account to signup with one click and start selling. There are no fees of any kind, other than those to your payment provider.

"Thanks to Facebook's platform and the affordability of our Cloud hosting provider Heroku, our cost of operation is quite low," said CTO Brian Thomason. "Given that, we don't feel the need to charge exorbitant rates like some websites out there. In fact, we don't wish to charge any fees at all."

Where revenue is concerned, Monarch plans to team up with a payment provider. Currently, only PayPal is supported for sending or receiving payments.

In addition to being free, Monarch also plans to entice users to join due to their integration features with Facebook. "We are not only an auction site. We are a full-featured ecommerce solution integrated into Facebook," said CEO Jason Radolec. "With one click of the mouse you can begin setting up a store, adding product inventory, and launching auctions. Once you have launched an auction, you can then share that with your friends or followers by using our 'Announce' feature to post it to your Facebook page or timeline."

Monarch also boasts a wishlist feature whereby users can essentially bookmark items they'd like to own. In turn, their friends can then view this list, and if they are feeling generous, can purchase an item from it and have it delivered directly to the owner of the list.

"We're a small team and we're just getting started, but we feel we already have a good baseline feature set for a successful social auction application," said Radolec. "We plan to tighten our integration with Facebook and expand our feature set with the help and input of our community."