eBay have announced that the iWays tool used to check whether your listings include non-secure content (HTTP instead of HTTPS) will be turned off at the end of the year.
The iWays tool has been invaluable for many sellers as a way to highlight listings which would need amending, otherwise they will display a security warning in browsers. It will now stop working on the 31st of December. eBay has requested that sellers update their listings to HTTPS secure content. This is not a change eBay particularly wanted but one forced on all websites across the Internet by Google and other browsers.
eBay say that business sellers can use the Seller Hub to check if any of their listings display with security warnings. Seller Hub shows all of your listings which are not compliant. They add that in order to update your listings to meet the new HTTPS standards, use Seller Hub to edit up to 200 listings at once. Simply select Edit listings in bulk then find and replace “HTTP” with “HTTPS”.
Of course it’s not quite that simply – if you’re calling HTTP content (perhaps from images your have embedded in your listing) then before you simply update HTTP to HTTPS you’ll also need to contact your host and ensure that you have a secure server available for your domain. If you don’t then adding an ‘S’ to HTTP will simply make your images vanish instead of becoming secure.
While listing templates have been used for decades on eBay, there’s ever more an argument for dumping them and going to text only listings. They work better on mobile and the eBay app, always display correctly regardless of browser, will never have a security warning and (so long as you stick to product information and don’t include Ts and Cs) will never need updating.
