Since I recently listed my first piece on eBay (http://bit.ly/U0kja9), I noticed all these attractive listing formats and wanted mine to look that good along with show off my style. If you create a listing from beginning to end entirely on eBay’s website you get a listing with the main picture in the upper-left hand corner with the other (12) pictures you uploaded and just the text description when you scroll down …. and that’s it.
The listings I was coming across were far fancier with borders around their entire listing body (description and pictures) and it had an actual graphical background – they look great ! How to get mine to look like that ?? I did searches online and the same sites kept coming up, sites that had either templates that looked out-dated, not my style at all or there was a fee associated with it – not for me. I even reached out to other artists for help, artists that had great-looking listings, artists that I am connected to through online sculpting forums and sculpting social networks but that didn’t really work out or get me anywhere.
One of my fellow artists, though, pointed me in the direction of Photobucket (thank you, Faith Tillbrook !) which I have had an account with for years but never occurred to me to utilize them for something like this.
So that had come to light, but I still needed something else to spice up my listings, something in the way of a theme. So after stepping away from it and “living my daily life” ideas started to come; here’s how I finally figured it out – the eBay listing templates are all HTML based, and you can get HTML links from Photobucket when you want to share an image from that site to another (eBay). So ! I realized I have Photoshop and then it hit me ! So I created my design that fit my style like a nice-looking description of my listing with my logo and whatever else I saw fit (this is were you create the theme of your listing), saved the file to my computer and uploaded it, along with the images I wanted to use for my listing, to Photobucket. If you don’t have Photoshop, you can use another image editing program. One of those alternatives I used for the description and the overall theme was PowerPoint which should come with every PC.
To save your PowerPoint slides as individual images you can upload to Photobucket:
Create your PowerPoint slide however you want, adding the nice-looking description with your logo (if you have one) or other miscellaneous pictures you want to add for decoration and whatever else you see fit
This was composed / created entirely in PowerPoint
Once that’s done, go to “File” > “Save As” and when the pop-up box appears to name your file, it should give you the option to change the file type. You can use either .JPEG, .PNG
Hit “Save” and another pop-up will prompt you basically asking “Do you want to export Every Slide or Current Slide Only”
Doesn’t really matter which you choose because if Current Slide only you’ll have to save every slide one at a time, Every Slide will save every slide (if you have multiple) and you’ll only have to do that Save process once
Once saved (wherever you chose to save it) you’ll have your images
Now you can upload them to Photobucket and the copy / pasting of the HTML codes to the WORD file then from the WORD file to eBay (after the codes are in the order you want the pictures to appear) part of the process kicks in at this point
I then went to Photobucket, clicked on the images in the sequential order that I wanted them to appear and as I clicked on each picture I copied the HTML code and pasted it in a WORD file, then I copied the image I wanted to come next and did the same, and so on …. pretty soon you’ll have a word file that looks like this –
each line of code is it’s own image
I found it’s better to paste the HTML codes in a word file first and intermittently save the file so you have a backup because if you paste it straight into the eBay listing description box on their site as you’re creating the listing – it can (and will) disappear and you will have to copy and paste all those codes again. It’s time-consuming.
After you have the codes pasted in the order you want, you’re pretty much set – all you do now is select all the codes from the WORD file and go over to your eBay listing’s description box and paste, but this needs a step-by-step, too, I found, so here it goes –
eBay recently (11/2012) redesigned their site (LOVE it) so these steps are up-to-date.
Go to eBay.com
Click on “Sell” in the upper-right hand corner
It’ll take you through the process of categorizing your item (you can also just click on “Browse to find a category”)
Once you find the right category, click on the green button saying “Create your listing”
you give it a title, upload pictures, select it’s condition and write the description
Here’s where the fun comes in –
The description are with have an option to “Switch to HTML editor”, click on that, copy the codes that you copied and pasted from the WORD file we created and paste them in the box
Click Next
Set your price, listing length, click Next
select your shipping, click Next
Now that you’re at the “Review” section of your listing (shown on the very top of the page high-lighted in Blue), here you’ll click on “Edit” in the first top section which has Title, Condition and Description
After you click on “Edit”, the Details section will display and it SHOULD have the codes you pasted earlier, if not, copy and paste them again from the WORD file (told you it was a backup 🙂
Now, simply click on “Preview Your Listing” and if all is well, “List it”
Hope this helps. I figured it out the hard way.
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