Integrate Ebay Template

dave davenport said

Hi Mathew,
stumbled along your website whilst looking for help on integrating a custom template into Ebay and found some of your articles very interesting.

I think an article on integration of a a custom template into Ebay would be helpful to a lot of people out there.
Dave

Morning Dave!

I think I understand what you mean. In a “normal” website, you design the product detail page once and the product data is filled into it automatically for each product. Images, titles, prices, descriptions and so on…

But with eBay, each listing is like a product page on a standalone website, but without the website behind it to drive the insertion of the data, its why selling tools for eBay & Amazon, such as LinnWorks, ChannelGrabber, eSellerPro and ChannelAdvisor have keywords, so that you can build the product page (AKA the “eBay Template”) and build the listing each time, but not from scratch.

I did create a tool a that can be used to do this without the complexity of the tools above and allow a user to have a template with keywords and just fill in the parts they want and hit go and for the listing creator to make the listing for them.

Take a look see it’s here: http://lastdropofink.co.uk/get…..tion-tool/

Also I believe you’ll find these two video’s very useful from two previous articles I wrote last year:

Part 1 – http://lastdropofink.co.uk/mar…..ng-part-1/
Part 2 – http://lastdropofink.co.uk/mar…..ng-part-2/

These both reverse engineer a live listing I chose at random and worked the data backwards and forwards, that should help, howee rif you have any questions, please just ask :)

Matt

Howdy Dave,

Ah TurboLister does support templates, but not to the level you or I would expect.

Matt

dave davenport said

Hi Matt,
Im slightly amazed at the lack of technical information coupled with a massive lack of usability within ebay. Even now I cannot fathom how to put a simple fixed width on the ebay listing or am I just having a “blonde” day?
Dave

ROFL, “blonde day”

It may help you to note that the listing, the description that a seller adds is in an iframe, not like it used to be as part of the main page. Anything above and below the description is out of bounds by normal means.

Matt

dave davenport said

If I import a csv file into ebay is it possible (before I ask how) to update an Ebay shop AND have a custom template without having to go in and edit each item?

I cant see why Ebay hasnt got a dynamic approach to custom templates and a speedier process as Im sure it would be easy to implement :-(

Dave

Howdy Dave,

It’s not that straight forwards as importing as basic CSV file, I wish it was and their tool for doing that FileExchange is weird to say the least, you’re better off importing a CSV file into TurboLister then listing, but thats a long story.

eBay doesn’t need to add that functionality, it has always left that to inventory management systems to offer those features as it’s those systems that have the extra information to populate the listing, something I’m sure eBay are learning via the xCommerce platform with Magento and M2Epro.

The upshot is that you basically need a 3rd party system to do what you want to do, otherwise you are definitely left manually editing listings, which sucks.

Matt

Howdy Dave,

You mention the one word that makes it pretty cheap “OpenCart”, add the “OpenBay” extension to it and you’ll get you inventory system and templating system included, it’s very straight forwards and very cheap.

It has it’s limitations, but fulfils you’re criteria above :)

Matt