Conquering eBay Template Issues When Importing

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jlee2027_yv75wi72

CEO at esa Software

Bringing innovation through automation to help small business succeed has been my career goal.

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What Are eBay Templates?

eBay Templates are provided by companies like Inkfrog and Activa to format the description of your eBay Listing (refer to the picture). This helps format your listings and make them look more professional.

How Does esa Product Manager Handle eBay Templates?

This is one of the top questions we receive from eBay sellers when signing up for esa Product Manager since you want things to run as seamlessly as possible. Once the first import is done, everything looks great.

• Products? Check.
• Pictures? Check.
• SKU field? Check.
• Then you see the description and you spill that delicious jelly doughnut you were eating all over your tie.

It turns out that lovely eBay template you spent hours creating, which looks awesome on eBay, came over and doesn’t look so great on your ecommerce store. What to do? The good news is that we can offer you a variety of solutions to handle this.

1) Drop the Template

You can go back to a “pre-Template” era.  The text would then look correct on both eBay and your online store. Not a very good choice at all.

2) Changing your Template

While it’s an option every eBay Seller has, this is usually not the ideal choice to make your Template look correct on both eBay and Shopify/Bigcommerce. This requires compromise and usually a number of changes you don’t want to do, such as removing eBay only links and eBay only text. 

Are your policies the same on both eBay and Shopify? If so, you can get away with this. But if, for example, you desire alternative payment methods besides PayPal in your Bigcommerce store, and need potential buyers to know about different policies, one Template fits all will not work. So this solution, while effective, is not the best.

3) Custom Code

By default, we never strip the HTML when importing until a customer asks. Most eBay Sellers don’t understand why this is. The technical answer is because this would leave a discombobulated mess, even WORSE than having your Template appear as is.

The problem is there are an endless number of templates and styles available to use for eBay sellers. There is no one batch of code that can be applied universally to all templates. I know this, because I’ve tried.  The advantage of custom code is you get to tell us how you want things in your store and we’ll do it. Usually for free. The downside is you change the eBay Template and things can break…badly.

4) User Tools

For Etsy, we took an entirely different approach, as Etsy does not accept HTML through it’s API in the Description field. We developed a User Tool so can convert and create your own Description. User feedback here has been limited, but entirely positive. You can watch the video of the tool here:

Please give us some feedback on what you think works best. Should we develop the same kind of User Tool for Shopify and Bigcommerce?  Leave us a comment below.