In spring 2016 eBay announced new rules for the presentation of offers on the online platform. Although not all details are known, the article description will change and be optimized regarding mobile devices. Furthermore active contents with flash or JavaScript are no longer allowed. The new rules will be introduced step by step from autumn 2016. To eBay traders an adaption of the eBay selling templates is essential.
What will change on eBay till 2017
A good article presentation often determines if costumers purchase or not. It is not surprising that eBay trades like to use individual designed templates.
These make it possible:
For example create dynamic links with an immediate purchase button
- Integrate Photo galleries
- Insert YouTube videos
- Show flash movies
- Send forms
- Create dynamic categories
- Submit cross selling offers
- Insert JavaScript for slideshows and other sliders
- Search fields
These active contents are used by eBay traders for their templates. Unfortunately they are contents which eBay won’t permit in the future.
This means that many selling templates won’t work properly anymore from spring 2017.
According to eBay every trader has to check his templates and appropriately adapt his selling templates.
Don’t wait till it’s too late. Using HTML5 Threendy offers you secure selling templates according the new eBay requirements. Only when you have technologically perfect templates eBay remains a working market platform. Don’t use insecure selling templates, our eBay templates works reliably without JavaScript and Flash.
1. What is about to come
In spring 2016 eBay announced new rules for the presentation of offers on the online platform. Although not all details are known, this is what is sure:
- Now: Preparation and adaption of eBay offer templates to the changes 2017. Quotation:
“To prepare for these changes, we encourage you to limit or eliminate your use of active content in eBay listings and Stores as soon as possible.”
Source: https://pages.ebay.com/sell/itemdescription/bestpractices.html
- Fall 2016: Display of automatic generated Item description summary feature as preview on the mobile listing site. Quotation:
“The View Item description summary feature will become available to sellers in the Summer of 2016. This feature will allow sellers using code in their item description to customize and optimize the item description summary as it appears on mobile devices.”
Source: https://pages.ebay.com/sell/itemdescription/customizeyoursummary.html
- From spring 2017: eBay will stop displaying active content in article descriptions and all dynamic and flash contents will be banned . Quotation:
“eBay will limit the use of active content in all listings across all devices and it will not be rendered by default.”
Source: https://pages.ebay.com/sell/itemdescription/bestpractices.html
2. What Does it Mean For You?
In the fast growing mobile market listing templates must be mobile ready. With responsive designs you optimize the article descriptions for mobile devices. You already have the opportunity to test your offer templates for mobile optimization.
Following some criteria that should be optimizes of a perfect mobile display:
- Usage of CSS media queries for responsive web design (without using JavaScript)
- Content may not be wider than viewport width. With smartphones this would be 320 pixels type size at least 14px
- Indication of meta viewport in header
- No use of JavaScript libraries
For spring 2017
Active content & Javascripts or forms are used in many templates. Unfortunately they are contents which eBay won’t permit in the future. This means that many selling templates won’t work properly from spring 2017.
This is why the eBay templates must be adapted.
Parts which often contain scripts and active content are:
- Dynamic eBay categories
- Dynamic cross selling categories like the modules bought from other companies which mostly run with Flash
- Slide show with Javascripts (changing & animated images)
- Form fields like eBay search field
- Photo galleries
- Videos and many wrong embedded YouTube videos
- Dybamic links like immediate purchase button
- Flash-video and other Flash based contents
- Scripts to display footer and other parts at the eBay store
- Scripts to load content from external systems at the eBay stores
- Dynamic filter function at the eBay store or on listing templates
- Script based drop down menus
3. How to be ready for 2017
By using HTML5 and CSS3 we already developed new solutions for 2017.
The eBay templates thus are future-proof and provide innovative & modern functions without using JavaScripts such as:
- Display of eBay categories as menu (without dynamic loading in templates but “pre-generation” in our editor/ template generator)
- Multi-level navigation
- Mobile menu navigation
- Static cross selling galleries (without dynamic loading in templates but “pre-generation” in our editor/ template generator)
- Picture galleries with zoom possibilities in lightbox
- Slider for category images or products
- Animated picture slide show
- OnPage SEO optimized
- Fast loading times
You define your mobile short description
In our eBay templates you have the possibility to determine the new introduced short description on the article site by yourself.
Therefore we use a HTML tag provided by eBay to determine this area which may contain up to 800 characters.
Selection of successful
eBay projects
Template usage:
As long as eBay allows HTML & CSS in listing templates and eBay stores and eBay-API is still provided, the templates will work perfectly well.
If eBay blocks the mentioned services or other web technologies, Threendy / we will not accept any liability for missing template parts or not working templates.
Customers who have acquired dynamic templates in the past years, have to have adapted their templates by us until spring 2017 (date not yet defined), if not all dynamic template parts will stop working which can lead to an incorrect display of the whole layout.