About Me
I've produced an item description for test listing 141018516788 on eBay USA that I hope will be (almost) mobile friendly. It is a two column layout including images with cross-promotional content in the right column. I suspect on smaller mobile device screens it will need to be viewed landscape. I also suspect that the image links (Sundresses & Coverups, Tops, etc.) in the right column will be too small for pressing when viewed on smaller mobile devices. Please confirm and post back any other issues/problems encountered.
I've turned on the "Listing Frame" feature for my eBay Store for this test. When an item listing is viewed directly at eBay.com instead of through an eBay Mobile App the listing frame displays a navigation bar to the left of the item description. I'm curious to learn if the eBay Apps display anything similar to the listing frame we see when accessing eBay directly.
Related: There has been some discussion on the web and in discussion groups arguing to avoid the display of photos within item descriptions and avoid use of HTML in general. First of all, I'd like to point out that any formatting done using eBay's "Standard" editor adds HTML to the item description even if only new lines and blank lines are incorporated within the text (HTML p and/or br tags). Much more HTML is added by the Standard editor when text is bolded, colored, indented, etc. -- formatting that organizes the content and/or makes it easier to read. I doubt anyone would advise we enter textual description without any formatting whatsoever, so based solely on the presence of HTML, using our own HTML* instead, such as the test example 141018516788, to further enhance the organization, readability, attractiveness, and to facilitate display of cross promotional content just makes the presentation better.
What about search engines? Part of the argument against using HTML and displaying images within item descriptions is based on speculation of what search engines see, including eBay's. Using eBay's dumb phone site http://wap.ebay.com/ we get an insight to how HTML formatting and photos are most likely stripped from item descriptions by eBay's search engine. Go ahead and take a look at the item description for 141018516788 at that dumb phone site to see how it all disappears leaving only the text. We can't be sure how search engines measure relevance but the presence of HTML and images is certainly not a handicap.
* I refer above to "our own HTML" but most sellers, without assistance, would not be able to produce a sophisticated presentation such as the example which automatically adapts to the screen size of the device being used to view it. I'm currently working on adding options within my FreeForm2 eBay Template Builder to enable such "responsive design". By testing the example with eBay Apps you are helping me finalize those options and hopefully soon to make them available to everyone (FreeForm2 is free to use).
Thanks in advance for your help!
Rob
PS: This is a copy of what I've posted on eBay USA discussion group Photos and HTML. eBay AU groups don't have such a group so I'm hoping you will help me here in Selling.
@robshelp wrote:
Related: There has been some discussion on the web and in discussion groups arguing to avoid the display of photos within item descriptions and avoid use of HTML in general. First of all, I'd like to point out that any formatting done using eBay's "Standard" editor adds HTML to the item description even if only new lines and blank lines are incorporated within the text (HTML p and/or br tags). Much more HTML is added by the Standard editor when text is bolded, colored, indented, etc. -- formatting that organizes the content and/or makes it easier to read. I doubt anyone would advise we enter textual description without any formatting whatsoever, so based solely on the presence of HTML, using our own HTML* instead, such as the test example 141018516788, to further enhance the organization, readability, attractiveness, and to facilitate display of cross promotional content just makes the presentation better.
What about search engines? Part of the argument against using HTML and displaying images within item descriptions is based on speculation of what search engines see, including eBay's. Using eBay's dumb phone site http://wap.ebay.com/ we get an insight to how HTML formatting and photos are most likely stripped from item descriptions by eBay's search engine. Go ahead and take a look at the item description for 141018516788 at that dumb phone site to see how it all disappears leaving only the text. We can't be sure how search engines measure relevance but the presence of HTML and images is certainly not a handicap.
Thank you for this info, it's something I've wondered about recently, and have read that the reason templates are discouraged by some is because it repeats quite a lot of the same HTML across all listings and eBay's search engine views it as duplicate content, and therefore listings containing it are of less relevance, but I had no idea how accurate that claim is, and if it's stripped by the search engine anyway, I presume any influence it has on rankings would be a minor one (I use Freeform2, by the way, the same template in a little over 300 listings, and have never had any issues - as far as I know - with search and rankings 🙂 ).
Unfortunately, I can't test the listing (no access to a mobile device at the moment), but will be interested in any results, also thought I'd ask if you'll be running the test with the upgraded store design? The basic framework is much the same as the current store design, and the store categories can still be in a lefthand menu on listings, but it's supposed to be more mobile friendly overall, and at some point (who knows when, 
) all stores are going to be uprgraded to the new look.
Cheers. 🙂
Hi digital*ghost, I don't believe the optional (for now) new store design effects the display of the item description listing frame except possibly the header bar being a little taller to accomodate a square logo vs the 310x90 "old store" size. I've confirmed elsewhere that eBay does not display a listing frame when shoppers are using the eBay Mobile App. Using a phone while not using a Mobile App would make shopping difficult on eBay.
The only mention of mobile I found on this page: http://pages.ebay.com/storefronts/modern/ is a reference to "tablets". The new store design would be friendlier to tablets because the featured items photos are displayed larger in the storefront home page. I seem to remember also seeing larger sized category links in the left column of the new design storefront pages. I doubt that the new storefront pages will automatically scale down to phone size or be presented in a different format and thus be completely mobile friendly.
I have had some test response on the USA and UK boards which are leading to some further adjustments I will be making to FreeForm2 to help sellers produce templates that scale well from big to tiny. When I've finalized I will post a link to the altered example here in AU Selling. It will be some time later that the new features are actually added to FreeForm2 at freeform2.robshelp.com
Regarding searches: The ability to remove HTML, CSS, and script from an item description is a very simple programming task. There's no reason for eBay to leave it in there prior to "reading" the textual content in the page for indexing purposes. Leaving it in would be just plain stupid and although we each have varying respect for eBay programmers, they're not stupid.
Thanks for your interest!
Rob
thecatspjs - I've pretty much decided that the right column should go away for the sake of mobile device users. That sort of promotion is probably better at the bottom so more width is available. Even there, each of the images should be taller as well so less mastery of the touch screen is required, 🙂
Thank you for testing!!
