Jane Bell is the eBay Anorak, business consultant for marketplace sellers and contributor to Tamebay. Here she looks at eBay’s new template designer.
This weekend I’ve been trying out eBay’s new free listing template designer from i-ways.net. It’s basic but will add some ‘shop pretty’ to your product description, it is responsive to mobile and doesn’t contain any active content and therefore will not be blocked by eBay in June 2017.
Let’s start with the important bit, your well keyworded description is more important than the shop pretty. Spend time researching your product keywords, this is time invested in the future visibility and sales of your listing, if you have a good quantity of this product it’s worth spending the time on it. Even a very short well keyworded description of 800 characters or less (including spaces) will give you a better return than a long winded description containing lots of non product specific information.
A while ago, i-ways.net provided a tool to test your listing description was up to standard for the changes in June 2017 and would show what active content was in your listing. Recently they have provided a listing template designer tool so you can make your own responsive design for free that is compliant with the impending changes. This tool also provides a free shop front design but I’ve not tested that one out yet, I prefer the eBay new shop design.
Signing up takes you through a process of connecting your eBay account, adding various shop and seller descriptions. There are four basic eBay shop templates and four item description templates to choose from then you can modify with colour and shop header pictures etc.
It is compatible with the eBay Sell Your Item form and can be added to the drop down list for managing templates in the advanced editing link above the description pane.
It is also compatible with other tools such as Afterbuy, Dreamrobot, eDock, ePages, eTope8, iMaio, JTL, M2EPro, Magnalister, Plentymarkets, ShoppingFlux, Twig and VOLO.
It does allow you to add a picture to your description template and although I’d normally advise against pictures in templates, it would be very useful for clothing sellers to add a size guide picture that won’t affect the mobile view and also any legal compliance type text that needs to go on a listing.
A little technical knowledge required but if you really do want a description template and for free then it’s worth a go as it guides you though the process. I tried it on one listing and it looks fine but I’m not going to use it throughout my shop or any of those that I manage as I like text only listings, far simpler and shows well regardless of the device. I prefer the K.I.S.S. approach so just KEEP IT SIMPLE …
9 Responses
I prefer Andrew Minaltos review, to pick a few quotes:
“I honestly don’t know whether to laugh or cry”
“Overall, I’m incredibly disappointed by this tool. I actually had a number of doubts from the beginning, and it just got worse and worse.”
“Overall I just don’t see the point of this tool AT ALL. There are no redeeming features that I can find”
The temps were rotten
After 18 minutes I am still waiting for my confirmation email. Not a good start
Tried it last week from the recent ebay business newsletter. Invalid password or username – username has not changed in 10 years. Password is the one I log into ebay with every day.
Just tried again from your link above – same result.
Another fine mess! and yet another reason why after 10 years I am now focussing on other platforms.
“public” beta, cant even look at it without registering, probably just another scam to bombard you wtih email.
Been waiting for a confirmation email for almost four hours now. Bloody amateurs!
I’ve been signed up for about 2 weeks and apart from the confirmation email that came through in about 5 mins I’ve not had one email from them so no worries on the spam front so far.
Signup is quick and easy, got my confirmation mail immediately.
The tool is basic and the resulting markup is fairly clean. 5s load times for the CSS aren’t so good.
Though currently free, the code is a bit too ‘proprietary’ for me.
I do hope we don’t lose the uniqueness of the eBay description as a result of this.