How to Create BEAUTIFUL eBay Listings in the POST Turbo Lister ERA!

And here’s a free, online based tool that I use for creating and formatting all my listing descriptions:

htmleditor.in

It’s basically a free What You See Is What You Get HTML editor offering a very rich formatting tools panel, including a quick and simple image insertion tool, bullet points and much more.

The first thing you want to do is click on the Maximise icon in the tools section to get the full window editor.

Next – click on the Source button which basically switches the editor from standard Design mode to HTML mode, just like on eBay. Then delete any code present and paste your template’s HTML code.

REMEMBER!!! You only want to use NOTEPAD and nothing else when you work with template code or any text for copying and pasting. Do not use Word or copy text directly from other websites! You always want to have all text saved in a Notepad file and copy from there – otherwise you’re going to completely mess up the formatting.

Once you have pasted your template’s HTML code, click on that Source button again to go back to Standard Design mode.

There you can start working on your listing just like you would on eBay directly or on the now discontinued Turbo Lister.

Add a headline, product description, payment, shipping & other texts. Format them! Make headlines bigger and BOLD. Selectively format text, break it up into small paragraphs so it’s easy to read and understand by quickly scanning your description.

Use bullet points or numbered lists where needed!

There’s even a handy TABLE creation tool built into this editor so if you need to create some sort of table, make sure to use that!

This is why I like this tool so much as it offers way more formatting tools than eBay does and even Turbo Lister was very limited in this way. But if you want to make a truly complex listing description, you can do so using this free htmleditor.in tool!

Now that all the text is properly formatted, it’s time to add product images! As you know, you will need to upload your product images somewhere online before you can insert them into your listing. If you have your own hosting account – use that. If not, you can use this website to upload images:

postimage.io

Make sure you upload images in the correct size, which will depend on your template’s width. If you’re using Spicy Auction Templates, the maximum width of your product images should be 700 pixels. So when you prepare your images, make sure to re-size them to a maximum width of 700 pixels before you upload them to your hosting account or postimage.io

Then you simply copy and save your image URLs in a notepad file so you can quickly and easily insert them into your listing.

What you do is click the cursor at the point where you want your image to appear and then select the IMAGE tool from the formatting menu.

Then paste the first image link that you saved in a notepad file under URL and then click OK!

If you’ve done everything properly, your first product image will appear in your listing.

Repeat the same steps for all other images and once your listing looks perfect all you have to do is click on the Source button – copy all of the HTML code and simply paste it on eBay, in HTML mode. When you switch to Standard mode on eBay, same formatting should show up, including all images of course.

Sometimes when you paste code on eBay and switch to Standard mode, it will show up with some formatting alignment issues. Don’t let that scare you! At the bottom of the page, click on the Preview Listing button and eBay will generate a preview of how your listing will look once live. In that preview everything should look fine.

Now, there’s one extra step you need to do before you copy the final code to eBay IF you’re using a responsive template.

How to know if you’re using a responsive template?

Simply re-size the browser like this and IF the template changes according to the size of your window, you’re using a responsive template.

On the other hand, if your template is not responsive, it won’t re-size – it will stay the same size like this.

So, if you’re using a responsive template, you need to edit the settings for EACH image you include in your listing to make them responsive too – so that they also change size when your template changes size. If you don’t do that, it will look like this – the text and template itself change according to the size of the window, but the images stay the same.

So it’s super important to make your images responsive too, otherwise your whole listing will look very bad on mobile devices.

Here’s what you need to do:

1)  Click on the first image in your listing

2)  Click on the Image button from formatting tools

3)  Click on the Advanced tab

4)  Under Stylesheet Classes enter this line of code: img-responsive center-block

5)  Under Style settings DELETE all the text that is there (if there’s any text)

6)  Click on OK!

You can now check if you have done everything correctly by re-sizing your browser window again and checking if the image changes size accordingly. As you can see – it does, which means that my first image is now responsive and will look perfect on mobile devices.

All you have to do is repeat the process with other product images you have inserted into your listing and once that is all done and tested – copy the final HTML code and paste it on eBay!

And that’s basically it – a simple, quick and free way to create and format beautiful eBay listings with lots of images, bullet points, tables and whatever else you want to include!

There’s one downside of using this tool though – you can’t save any work you do on the go! As it’s an online tool there’s no way to save it.

So if your internet connection is unstable or if you know that it’s going to take you a long time to finish your listing, make sure to periodically save your work! How? By simply switching to HTML mode, copying all code and saving it in a notepad file.

Then if something happens and your internet stops responding or your computer crashes, you’ll always have a back-up copy of the work you’ve done. All you have to do then is copy the saved code from the notepad file and paste in to the html editor.

This tool does save your work in some way though – you can use UNDO and REDO buttons to go backwards or forwards a few steps if you have made a formatting mistake for example. So this is another great advantage over eBay’s tool which does NOT offer UNDO and REDO buttons!

Hope this helps & I’ll see you in the next video!