eBay announced earlier this year that sellers would need to remove contact details from their listings and they’ve updated this advice in their Autumn 2017 Seller Release.
Highlights
- You can no longer include contact details in item descriptions.
- From October 2017, eBay may obscure contact details if you include them in your item descriptions.
- From early 2018, eBay may remove listings that contain contact details or links that direct buyers off eBay.
Allowable links in listings
- Information on delivery services.
- Product videos, e.g. reviews, product demonstrations or installation
NB videos can only be links, you can no longer embed videos in your listings - Other legally required information, such as warranties.
Where to display your contact details
Business sellers are legally obliged to disclose their contact information to buyers and so must complete the Business Seller Information section in My eBay. By doing so, eBay will automatically display your business contact details and address in the Business info section of your profile (technically available to buyers, although a couple of clicks away from the listings page, so fulfils the minimum legal requirements).
On individual listings, eBay will display your VAT number (if available) along with the Terms and conditions for the sale, your Returns policy and any additional legally required contact information you enter in My eBay.
eBay also added a new feature recently which lets you share a customer service phone number with customers who’ve purchased items from you. Visit the manage your buyers’ questions page to add these details now.
Better images for sellers of custom made items
Images sent through eBay messages are now rendered in higher resolution, up to 1600×1600 pixels, instead of the previous maximum of 500×500 pixels. This is much better than the previous highly compressed images and sufficient to print low quality or small products.
Realistically however, there is still room for improvement and some sellers (e.g. those printing 3 metre banners) will need higher resolution than can be sent through eBay. Images are now being compressed to around 9% of the original size instead of 0.9%.
Adding links to your listings
For links that you are permitted to use in your listings you need to use the target=”_blank” attribute in your HTML item description.
eBay recommend you update your compliant hyperlinks at your earliest convenience to ensure they continue to work correctly in the future. Until the end of 2017, eBay will temporarily auto-correct any links that do not contain the target=”_blank” attribute.
7 Responses
Ironic, I was reading the seller update and when you view the section on links it gives two examples using the words “yourlinkhere”, I am using chrome and it makes the ebay examples into clickable links, both links take you to 123reg, i.e an “off ebay” website.
Can you have contact details in your shop and listing template? We have a tab that has our contact details in it, but its not part of the description so may not count.
I’ve just had notification from ebay to amend a listing with contact details and/or off-site links in it. Went in to to look at the specified listing – it’s for key ring chains. The ebay over zealous wordbot has picked up the word ‘ring’ in the listing (!) and assumed that it refers to a telephone number or incitement to call us. Changed it to Keyring instead of Key Ring and this has solved the issue.
Good luck to anyone selling jewellery or any other form of product with the word ring in it.
Words fail me eBay, they really do.
Get a ruddy grip.
Links Policy – using a third party listing designer
Please be aware. If you have used a third party listing designer and they have put a link in about “Powered By ….” or similar on your listings – this is now being flagged as contrary to the Link policy in Seller Dashboard. We had our first ‘warning’ today.
Having fun this morning. We’ve got warnings popping up for links on our listings. These are links to reviews of the item’s we’re selling (Trusted Reviews, Tech Radar or Expert Reviews), or links to where you download the app for your smartphone to be able to use the product.
God forbid that we inform and educate our prospective customers to understand in full the capabilities of the product prior to purchase. Who wants an informed customer?
I literally finished editing all of my listings 2 weeks ago to meet the active content rules. Time to start the process all over again.
To top it all off, we’re getting errors left right and centre on eBay today:
It looks like there’s a problem with this listing.
• System temporarily unavailable, please try listing again.
Once the links are removed, they’re still showing up as being non-compliant due to ‘links’. Great….
How ironic, after all the recent discussion about hiding contact details I have just had a telephone call followed by a text message on my mobile from an ebay customer complaining about an order, when i asked where he got my mobile number from he said eBay customer support gave it to him ?