Welcome Back! Now that we ve covered the basics on how to use templates and how to customise them, it s time to learn some more advanced techniques that will help you create outstanding ebay listings! If you re doing more than a few listings a week on ebay, you ll know how time consuming listing creation, management and scheduling can be, especially if you do it manually and one by one, on ebay directly. Luckily there are automated listing tools available today, such as Auctiva.com which is a web based listing service and Turbo Lister which is a desktop software. While I won t go into details on how each one is better than the other in this video, just so you know there s no one perfect listing tool each solution has its advantages and disadvantages. Turbo Lister is the official listing tool created by ebay and in my opinion it s the easiest way to create, manage and list on ebay, unless you use more sophisticated systems like Linnworks. For most people Turbo Lister will work just fine and that s why I ll be using it in this video. The only real downside to using Turbo Lister is that it can be buggy at times it can freeze for no reason or show an error or two. From what I have seen, these problems are highly related to what computer/software set-up you have as some people experience a lot of problems while for me, the only problem is occasional screen freezing. While updating or re-installing Turbo Lister will fix most errors, with freezing just waiting works best. So when Turbo Lister freezes, don t do anything! Don t click all over the place just wait 5-10 seconds and in most cases the software will then work fine. Another thing with Turbo Lister is that it s a Windows application so you can t install it on a MAC device. Luckily, there s a way around this and you can still run it on your MAC if you install Windows via Bootcamp, a special tool that lets you run Windows on your MAC. Bootcamp is free and comes with every latest OS X operating system. A more advanced option, and what I personally opt for, is to buy Parallels Desktop software, which allows you to run Windows applications at the same time as your run your native OS X system. With this software you don t have to restart your computer every time you switch from a MAC application to a Windows one, like you do with Bootcamp. Of course you will have to purchase a Windows license to make it work but still, I think it s a good deal considering that the price tag for alternative, MAC-only listing software is close to the cost of Windows for home use. While I m personally using Turbo Lister in this video, that doesn t mean you can t use any other listing software and apply the same principles. You can even follow this video and apply everything when creating a listing directly on ebay! Without further delay, let s get started! First Things First If you haven t done it already, download Turbo Lister from ebay. Please note that there are two versions for the program the US version which can be downloaded from ebay.com and the UK version which can be downloaded from ebay.co.uk While you can add additional ebay sites in Turbo Lister after the install, I recommend you start with the version you ll be working with most. So for example, if your main platform is ebay.co.uk,
download Turbo Lister from the UK site. From several tests this has proven to create fewer problems later on when using the program. Once you have downloaded and installed Turbo Lister, we re ready to create our first listing. To speed up this process, what I like to do is gather all my listing information beforehand so I have it handy in a notepad file for easy copying and pasting! As you can see, I have: Image URLs Product description Payment information Shipping information Returns information Contact information All written down and prepared in a notepad file. Remember that you only want to use NOTEPAD for such tasks. Never ever use Word, Excel, or any online website for copying content directly into Turbo Lister! It will mess up the HTML code and you will end up with a buggy listing you can t even edit or format. So ALWAYS use notepad for managing content and copying and pasting it into Turbo Lister. The next step is to actually launch Turbo Lister and create our first listing. I won t spend much time covering Turbo Lister s interface as it s pretty straightforward and you can find plenty such overview videos on YouTube. Let s just start working on our first listing by clicking on New > Create New Item. This is the main listing editing window where you basically add the same information as you would do on ebay directly starting from the item s title, sub-title, variations, images and so on! Now, in the Description Builder we won t write anything there just yet, but put some dummy text for now as otherwise Turbo Lister won t allow us to save the listing. Next, select the listing format, price, quantity, shipping information, payment details etc. We won t spend time on these as they re exactly the same info blocks you would be filling out if listing directly on ebay and it s all pretty much self-explanatory. Some of these settings can also be set account-wide, directly in your ebay account like your returns policy and buyer filters. Once all this information is in place, I like to save the work done so far (just in case Turbo Lister crashes and you lose everything). In the main Turbo Lister window we can now see the listing I just created. I will double click it to go back to the Editing view and click on description builder to start working on the actual listing description. The first thing you want to do is check the Photo Hosting settings. You want to set it to Self-Hosted images so you can easily insert product images inside the template s description block. Next step is to get the template code. To do this, simply find the template you want to use from our directory and download the TEXT or ZIP file version to your computer and open it up in notepad.
The next thing to do is copy the template s HTML code from notepad, then switch to HTML mode in Turbo Lister and paste the code there. After that is done, click on Preview just to make sure that the template files load up nicely. Give it a few seconds to load all images. If no images show up and you re wondering why, you can also try making a right click and refreshing the page as sometimes Turbo Lister doesn t connect to the internet automatically. All looks good in my case so I m going back to Design view to continue working on the actual listing description. Just so you know, this is how all 3 views work in Turbo Lister: Design View this is where you write the description, insert images and do general formatting using the built in, what you see is what you get, visual editor. HTML View this is where you add your template s HTML code and can do manual editing, such as add code to embed a YouTube video. Preview this is where you can preview your listing to see exactly what it will look like when live on ebay. So I m just copying the item s description text from notepad and pasting it into the listing description, in Design View. IMPORTANT!!! To keep the listing s layout and formatting, there s a specific way you need to delete the pre-filled text we have in our templates - the parts which say: Text Goes Here What you need to do is: * Select almost all of the text, leaving just the first word un-selected, like this * Delete it (click on the Delete or Backspace button on your keyboard) * Now start typing in your listing s headline, next to that one word (Text) that you didn t delete * Lastly, click to get your cursor right in front of the text you just wrote and using the Backspace key, delete the word TEXT letter by letter. Now you can continue with adding more information, images and everything else! The same rules apply to the Payment, Shipping, Contact & Returns blocks. Just do exactly the same thing when you add your information to these blocks to ensure you don t mess up your template s code.. It is very important to follow these guidelines! Otherwise you may accidentally delete parts of the template, which will completely mess up your formatting and your listing just won t look right. Next, I ll format the main headline. There s no one way of doing this right, but these design guidelines will keep you on the right track: For the main headline, use Verdana, black at 18 or 24-point (depending on how long your headline is). For the sub-headline, use the same font style but smaller in size 14-point or 18-point. What I also like to do is make the sub-headline dark red, to add more emphasis. As you can see, it looks quite good very clear and easy to read and understand!
Right below your headline, you want to put your first and main product image. To do this, simply click your cursor where you want the image to be, center it, copy image URL from notepad and click the Insert Picture icon from the main menu bar to add the image URL. To make sure it s the correct image, you can click Preview before inserting the image into the listing description. All looks good! IMPORTANT!!! You want to use different size images here than the ones you ll be using for Gallery images to upload to ebay. Gallery images will be much bigger, 1600 x 1600 pixels, while the images you insert in the description block should be no bigger than 700 pixels in width! Please keep this in mind when preparing images as if you use images that are too big here, not only will your template not look right, your listings will also be very slow to load due to increase file sizes. So for our Spicy Auction templates, 700 pixels in width is the maximum size you want to use. You can go smaller too but I would recommend sticking with 600 to 700 pixels to make the most out of the space our templates provide. Next, I ll format the main description text. Start with splitting up text into paragraphs. Each paragraph should be a max of 3 or 4 lines. Then, selectively bold some of the most important parts of text. You can also use dark red here to draw attention to / emphasise parts of the description. By doing this we make the text so much easier to read! Most people nowadays don t even want to read any large blocks of text and instead quickly scan through it and take the most important parts. So by doing some basic formatting, we really help our customers go through and understand the product description much quicker. If you have any kind of list, use bullet points, ALWAYS! You can use Turbo Lister s built in bullet points OR to make your listing look even more attractive, use small images/icons for bullet points. As you can see, I have created small circle bullet points for my template. I just use the Insert Picture feature to insert these small icons where bullet points should go. If you do this, remember that these icons should be very small, roughly 15 by 15 pixels with standard sized text. Great! I have now formatted my description text and added images. Next; click on the preview tab to see how it will all look on ebay! Everything looks fine so I ll go back to Design View to finish it up by adding payment, shipping, contact, and returns information. Keep it simple and to the point! Use single lines and short sentences. If you re struggling with the formatting, text sizes and colours, just COPY ME! Do exactly as I do in this video use the same font style, size, and colour and you can t go wrong! This is super simple, fool-proof formatting ANYONE can implement! When these additional information blocks are added and formatted, switch back to Preview for the last time to double check how the listing will look on ebay. All looks great to me so I m just saving my listing to quit Edit mode. Then there s one last step you need to complete!
Re-open your listing and change the photo hosting mode to ebay s hosting and then re-save your listing. This way you can use ebay s FREE image hosting service for your gallery images. Remember, you want to use different images here plus they must be much bigger in size, ideally 1600 by 1600 pixels. And they must be SQUARE!!! Why? Take a look at this search result on ebay As you can see, that one listing in the middle takes up less than 50% of the SPACE available compared to other listings that use square gallery images! And I hope I don t have to tell you that larger images will attract more views, clicks, and therefore sales as a result. And this is exactly why you should always, ALWAYS have square images for your ebay listing gallery images! ebay won t take care of image editing for you, so you can t just upload whatever images you have and hope for the best! Even if image editing is not your thing and such technical stuff scares you off, you really should learn at least the basics behind preparing images for ebay use. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you want the same size (number of pixels) for both the width and height of your image, to make it square. The easiest way to do this is by simply using the CROP tool in an image editing program of your choice (Photoshop, online editors or other). So what you do is simply enter the width and height within the crop tool settings, so they re the same, and then select all of the image or part of it to make it square. That s all there is to it really! If the item you sell is tall (like a selfie stick or scope for a rifle), rotate it so it takes up most of the space in your image, like this If you sell multiple colours of the same item, you can (and should) create a gallery image that features all available colours in your listing, like this Either way you ll end up with a square, fully filled image that takes up as much space in the search results as possible. Lastly, ebay recommends that gallery images are 1600 x 1600 pixels large. If you take your own images, you won t have any problems with this as pictures from your camera will be larger than that. But if you don t have access to high resolution images (for example when your supplier sends you images to use on ebay), DON T make it 1600 x 1600 pixels large as the quality of the image will suffer greatly in this case. What you want to do is still keep the square aspect ratio but instead of 1600 x 1600 pixels, use smaller numbers. 1000 x 1000 pixels is still a very large image for ebay use and even 800 x 800 can be used. Whatever size you use, the width and height should be the same! I hope this clears up the gallery image situation but if you still have questions about this, feel free to post them in our forum for further help.