I was just reading this post at the Seller Source Book blog, about vrane.com‘s Power Adder. This tool allows you to add to all your listings at once, which might be useful if you’re suddenly going to be away, or need to add other important information to listings that are already live.
The problem with Power Adder, however, is that there isn’t a Power Subtractor: once that message is on, it’s there to stay – and if you’re like me with lines of repeatable stock on SIF listings that go on forever, having a message that says you’re going to be away for Xmas show up in June doesn’t really look good. Fortunately, there are a couple of alternatives that make things easier for you.
Firstly, as many sellers already know, there are Shop Holiday Settings. Accessed through Manage My Shop, these allow you to add a message to all your listings to say that you’ll be away until whatever date, and also if you choose to, to hide SIF listings so that new buyers can’t access them.
And for other messages – “my email’s borked, please use My Messages”, “today’s the last posting day before Xmas” and so on – or for those who don’t have a Shop, I add a tiny white square image to all my listings: this needs to be self-hosted, so that when you need to add a message to your listings, you can just create a new image with the message written on it, overwrite the original image by uploading it to your web host with the same filename, and as if by magic, it shows up on all your listings. And the best part – when you want the message to disappear, you overwrite the file again with a blank image, and it’s gone. Make the blank image as small as 1 pixel square, and no one will even spot it on your auction layout.
Messages where you want them, without even having to give a third party your eBay password. Hope that helps someone out. 🙂
One Response
The image idea works well – I’ve been running it for several years and use it for things like seasonal greetings, combined postage availability reminders, and more recently – announcing to the world which dirty tricks eBay have been up to (such as chopping trans-Atlantic visibility).
Naturally I also use them to promote items and ranges – it does work, but it’s not easy to measure other than by gut feeling.