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Hack 40 Formatting the Description with HTML

Use HTML tags to turn a drab block of text into
an interesting, attractive, and effective sales tool.

As a seller on eBay,
you're expected to wear a lot of hats: diplomat,
market researcher, salesperson, and yes, even web designer. Since
eBay auctions are web pages, your description area can be decorated
with the same fonts, colors, images, links, and tables found on any
other web site.

If you're already familiar with HTML, you'll probably want to skip this primer and just use it as a quick-reference. The rest of the hacks in this chapter contain more meaty HTML code.

4.9.1 Rapid HTML Primer

For many sellers, the introduction to HTML comes in the
disappointment of seeing a carefully formatted description seemingly
mutilated by eBay. For example, this text:

Antique steam shovel toy:
real working treads
working shovel, turn crank to raise
glossy red lacquer
in immaculate condition!

will look like this when viewed on an eBay auction page:

Antique steam shovel toy: real working treads working shovel, turn crank to raise glossy red lacquer in immaculate condition!

The fault lies not with eBay, but with the way web browsers interpret
plain text. All spacing, alignment, and line breaks are effectively
ignored in favor of the HTML code that is the basis of formatting in
all web pages.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) consists of plain text interspersed
with markup tags. A tag is a special formatting
keyword enclosed in pointy brackets (also known as carets and
greater-than and less-than symbols). For instance, simply place the
<br> tag in your text to insert a line
break, or <p> to insert a paragraph break.
For example:

real working treads<br>working shovel, turn crank to raise<br>glossy red lacquer

Tags that modify text actually require two parts: a tag to turn the
formatting on and another to turn it off. For example, the
<center> tag, used to center-justify text
and images, requires a corresponding
</center> tag later on to restore the
default left justification. Other tags that work like this include
<b>bold</b>,
<i>italics</i>, and
the <table></table> structure, all
described in the next sections.

4.9.2 HTML Quick Reference

Table 4-2 shows some of the more tags^[2]
you'll use in your auction descriptions, and how
they'll appear on the auction page.

^[2] For a complete listing of all HTML tags, consult an HTML
reference such as www.w3.org or
HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide
(O'Reilly).

So using some of these tags, we can fully reproduce the steam shovel
description as intended:

Better yet, let's use bullets:

Note that the individual tags don't have to be on
separate lines, but it would sure make the code easier to read. Table 4-3 shows the commonly used HTML tags that affect
the appearance of text.

Tags can be combined to achieve just about any effect. Take care when
nesting HTML tags, however, so that structures do not improperly
overlap. For example, this is wrong:

The <i>coldest <b>winter</i></b> I ever spent

But this is correct:

was <i>a summer in <b>San Francisco</b></i>

Essentially, tags that are opened first should
be closed last.

If you want to test your HTML code before placing it into your auction, simply type it into a plain text editor. Save the file with the l filename extension and open it in your favorite web browser. Reload/refresh to see changes as they're made.

4.9.3 Images and Links

An
image of any size, from a tiny icon to a full-size photo of what
you're selling, can be inserted anywhere in your
text using the <img> tag, like this:

<img src="/image/library/english/10062_ebay_logo_home.gif">

In this case, the image URL points to a GIF file on
eBay's pics.ebay.com server that happens to be the
eBay logo itself. See [Hack #59] for
information on placing your photos on the Web and referencing them
from your auctions.

By default, the image will appear inline with the text, which
typically doesn't look very professional. Instead,
you can left-justify or right-justify the image and the text will
wrap around it:

<img src="/image/library/english/10062_ebay_logo_home.gif" 
align=right hspace=4 vpsace=7 border=1>

Also shown in this example are the hspace and
vspace parameters, which specify invisible
horizontal and vertical margins in pixels, and the
border parameter, which places a black line around
the image with the thickness also specified in pixels.

Hyperlinks are created by placing the <a>
(anchor) structure around ordinary text, like this:

<a href="http://www.ebayhacks.com/">click here</a>

Here, the text "click here" will
automatically appear blue and underlined in your auction, and when
clicked will navigate to the URL http://www.ebayhacks.com/. Make sure to
include the closing </a> tag to end the
hyperlink.

Always test each and every one of your links before placing them into your auction descriptions. The last thing you want is 20 confused bidders emailing you because you mistyped a URL in one of your links.

Of course, you don't want your bidders to click a
link and leave your auction, never to return. To have the link open
in a new window, leaving your auction description window intact,
include the target="_blank" parameter:

<a href="http://www.ebayhacks.com/" target="_blank">click here</a>

Note that the <img> and
<a> tags can be combined to make clickable
images; see [Hack #60] for details.

4.9.4 Tables

Tables
are easy to create and are a great way to organize information in
your auction descriptions. A table is defined with a single
<table></table> structure with one or
more <tr></tr> and
<td></td> structures contained
therein. For instance, this code defines a simple table with two rows
and two columns:

<table width=90% border=1>
<tr>
<td>Color:</td>
<td>red lacquer with chrome trim</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Dimensions:</td>
<td>3 inches high, 4 inches long</td>
</tr>
</table>

Each <tr></tr> structure defines a row
in the table, and each <td></td>
structure defines a single table cell inside that row. Once a row is
complete, another row begins. The resulting table looks like this:

Note that text and images should never be placed outside the
<td> tags. Use indents, like in the example
above, to make the code more readable and to help you keep track of
your rows and columns.

Using
nested tables, you can create a
nice-looking box to highlight important information:

<table border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 width=40% bgcolor=#000000>
<tr><td>
<table width=100% border=0 cellspacing=1 cellpadding=3>
<tr><td bgcolor=#CCCCCC align=center>
<b>Condition of this item</b>
</td></tr>
<tr><td bgcolor=#FFFFFF>
Brand new in the original box with all original paperwork.
<br>Batteries are not included.
</td></tr>
</table>
</td></tr>
</table>

which should look something like this:

The bgcolor parameter in the
<td> tag sets the background color; the
six-digit code is explained in [Hack #41].

Tables are also often used to make simple bars and stripes. For
example, to include section headers that match those on eBay auction
pages, use this code:

<table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr><td bgcolor="#9999CC">
<img src="/image/library/english/10062_x.gif" width=1 height=1>
</td></tr>
<tr><td bgcolor="#EEEEF8" nowrap>
<img src="/image/library/english/10062_x.gif" width=6 height=1>
<font face="Arial" size="3"><b>
Your Title Goes Here . . . 
</b></font>
</td></tr>
</table>

Table cells with background colors set with the aforementioned
bgcolor parameter can be fine-tuned with
transparent, single-pixel images (like x.gif
here) used as spacers.

4.9.5 Using a WYSIWYG Editor

For more complicated page layouts, you may wish to use a
graphical web page editor such as
Netscape/Mozilla Composer (free from
www.netscape.com or www.mozilla.org),
HTML-Kit (free from
www.chami.com/html-kit), or any
word processor (Wordperfect, Word, etc.).

The problem is that web page editors are all designed to generate
complete HTML pages, not snippets to be inserted into other pages,
which means that the generated HTML code must be modified before
it's inserted into your auction description.
Otherwise, your page may not display correctly and may even interfere
with people's ability to bid on your item.

If you've generated a page with a Microsoft Office application such as Word, Excel, or Powerpoint, the resulting HTML will be clogged with extraneous codes that should be removed. The easiest way to do this is to use the Microsoft Office HTML Filter, available for free at www.microsoft.com/downloads.

First, open the generated HTML file in a plain text editor (e.g.,
Notepad on Windows) so you can see the HTML tags. The actual body of
the page will be contained within a
<body></body> structure, so all you
need to do is delete everything before the opening
<body> tag and the closing
</body> tag, as well as the tags themselves.
Then, select everything that's left (Ctrl-A), copy
it to the clipboard (Ctrl-C), and paste it into the description field
of the Sell Your Item form at eBay (Ctrl-V).

eBay also provides a WYSIWYG auction description editor as
part of the Turbo Lister auction listing tool; see [Hack #73]. But if you want to use the same
design for all your auctions, you'll still need to
be somewhat familiar with HTML, so you can create clean code that can
be used again and again.