We wrote earlier this month that stronger browser standards are coming and that eBay.com advised removing HTTP content from your listings or replacing it with HTTPS content (content stored on a secure server). eBay UK and other sites across the EU will be making changes to eBay.com which will impact how your listings are displayed if you don’t edit them in the near future.
From October 2017, any externally hosted content such as cascading style sheets (CSS), images, or HTML5 that don’t use the HTTPS communications protocol will display with a not secure icon depending on your buyer’s web browser. Frankly this is likely to put off buyers.
To avoid any negative impact on your sales, you should contact your hosting provider or third-party partner before October 2017 to find out whether they support HTTPS. As long as they support HTTPS, your item descriptions and images should display properly. You may need a little extra to have your images stored on a secure server.
It’s very likely that if you host your own images these will be on an insecure server. Whilst we’re well aware of all the arguments in favour of hosting your own image (more than 12 images, larger images etc), this could well be the time to consider scrapping your own hosting in favour of eBay Gallery Images. You get 12 free eBay Gallery images, they’re fully optimised for mobile and browser size and eBay will ensure they’re hosted on a secure URL for you.
The US announcement said “To avoid any negative impact on your sales, you should contact your hosting provider or third-party partner before October 2017 to find out whether they support HTTPS. As long as they support HTTPS, your item descriptions and images should display properly”. We don’t know if this will be the same in the UK, or if your listings will simply have a big notice stating that the page is insecure to put buyers off.
Regardless how eBay handle your listings, the only sensible thing to do is to move to a secure server (Check out Tamebay’s URL and notice the secure padlock item in the browser bar and the https://channelx.world URL format).
To help you identify insecure content, eBay have developed a tool with iWays which is available for eBay.co.uk, eBay.com and eBay.ie.
8 Responses
Great news, especially when most sellers have not even removed active content.
Would have made sense to add this in with the active content update.
Hopefully won’t be a problem as my website which hosts my images already uses https:// – I’m actually up to date with technology unlike a certain company worth 38 billion
Wish they’d invest in improving / future proofing the platform. It would give me more confidence as a seller. If I can make my website HTTPS over a year ago.. whys it taken them so long – new browser standards have hardly come out of nowhere
I wonder if anyone can help me.
We host our images on a server which is currently http so hasn’t got a SSL certificate.
If I buy a SSL certificate and the server suddenly becomes secure, will I have to change the URL of the image in the ebay HTML from https:// to https://
or will the customer’s browser automatically know that even though the address is https:// behind is a secure SSL.
The html is currently coded as https://etcetc/picture1.jpg
Yeah, a couple of simple search and replaces should do the trick in most contexts with regards to SSL proofing.
Even if your listings are in a state you can code together an API based solution to run through your listings and replace HTML description strings such as
src=”https://
vocab=”https://
, etc with their https:// equivalents.
best to check your CSS image references also 🙂
Then update the associated description and you’re sorted.
Or update your descriptions using a similar but manual, time-consuming way with ebays bulk listing tool. Again, the time this takes depends on your total number of listings.
If you’re going through a third party for your descriptions then I’d hope they have already sorted your listings out by now, otherwise best get on the blower to them and remind them what you’re paying for 🙂
I use self-hosting for style sheets and images. I’m happy to switch to https, but eBay need to make everything more explicit to users so they understand the consequences. In the forums some people have been talking about eBay trials being run on their accounts, whereby their entire description is hidden, and only viewable by a button that the potential buyer has to click in order to view it. Some were told by eBay staff that it was testing in preparation for the https changes coming with Google. I don’t see how that makes any sense, but there you go.
eBay ought to recommend everyone switch to https for self-hosting, or they should allow people to upload a series of pictures with each listing for free, on their own secure servers.