We’re so used to having 12 free gallery images on eBay UK that it never occurred to me it wasn’t the same across all eBay sites. eBay France and eBay Italy have just joined the 21st century and announced free photos for all sellers.
eBay say that listings with multiple images give greater confidence to buyers and can increase your conversion rates.
Many sellers still add images to the listing description rather than upload them as eBay gallery images. Today the arguments for doing so (bar that you have more than 12 images to display) are weaker than ever before. eBay allow large images with zoom, they display images in search results and the eBay gallery images are the default view on mobile whereas you have to click through to see the description. If that wasn’t enough, eBay also optimise your images to display them on desktop, mobile or tablet with the fastest download speeds possible – your lovely 2400 pixel wide images embedded in your description will take longer to download, especially on a slow mobile connection.
If you still host images in your eBay descriptions, seriously consider adding them as gallery images instead. And, if you list on eBay France or Italy, start uploading additional images for free.
4 Responses
There is in fact a fairly serious bug with the way that eBay handles its gallery images.
For performance reasons it uploads even self-hosted images for gallery photos. However, frequently a relist command sent through the API will pick up a smaller version of the image resulting in the *seller* getting a relist failure because eBay’s own hosted image has failed its own size test. The original self-hosted image remaining perfectly fine, of course, and the seller is left scratching their head as to what they did wrong.
This is frustrating if you relist a lot of listings regularly as we do. Around 40% of our listings failed this evening and had to be relisted manually. This is an issue that’s we’ve been noticing and reporting for around 2 years now.
We’ve had a response from our most recent report that eBay are “looking into it”. We hope that this can be resolved. It’s just not fit for purpose as it stands.
Just asked Webinterpret to make sure they are aware of the changes but they haven’t heard yet.
Chris, when is this supposed to be live and do you have any links I can point webinterpret to ??
I remember the UK situation and people were revising, thinking it was free additional images, BUT they had to wait until the listing renewed before it kicked in.
(I am sure, just an ebay oversight and not an intentional money maker)
Kind regards Simon
==========
Jan Ratajski, Feb 20, 16:01 CET:
Hello Simon,
My name is Jan and I will pass this information it to our product managers.
For now I have not received any official communicates regarding the additional pictures on those markets, but we will definitely consider it as it has chance to positively affect the sales of all our Ebay customer.
For now I cannot give you an official answer for this questions, but If we decide that we can safely increase the number of pictures, We will contact all our customer to let you know about it.
Thank you for your feedback.
Kind regards,
Jan Ratajski
Thanks Chris.
The links are slightly bold same colour on my screen, so very difficult to see.
That might be just me though.
Information passed to webinterpret so hopefully some increased sales again, although why it has taken ebay SOOO long is a mystery.
Kind regards simon