How to Add YouTube Videos to Your eBay Listings!

One of the easiest ways to bring online selling closer to the real life experience is by using video. Product pictures, if done properly, also are very important of course but with some products, video is just so much more effective, especially if you can demonstrate how it works and give a brief review of the product’s features and benefits.

It’s actually surprising to see how few eBay listings have videos in them. All the major online shops, including Amazon, have been using product videos for quite some time now. eBay, as always, is a few years behind everyone else and does not provide a simple way for people to upload videos to listings.

It’s not prohibited though – eBay does allow videos to be embedded inside listing descriptions but you have to figure out how to do it on your own.

If you don’t want to learn special video hosting programs or pay for them, the easiest way to do this is simply by using good-old YouTube for this purpose. It takes just a few steps to add a YouTube video to your listing and best of all – it’s 100% free!

There are a few downsides though:

• YouTube videos may show ads when played in your listing, potentially turning some customers away.(if you OWN the video, you can disable ads in your account settings).

• YouTube videos will show related videos at the end of yours which can again potentially take customers away from your listing.

• YouTube videos on eBay will play in Flash, which means that they won’t be shown to people using mobile devices that don’t support Flash.

So it’s certainly not a perfect set-up, BUT, if you need something that’s FREE and easy to use, it’s still your best option.

I will also try to cover professional video hosting/embedding systems in the up-coming months – as though there is a cost attached, they do eliminate all 3 of the problems described above.

Ok, without further ado, let’s get started!

How to Embed a YouTube Video In Your eBay Listing!

Up until recently, this process was very easy – you just had to go to the YouTube video you want to use, click on the Embed button, choose “use old embed code”, set the size and simply COPY & PASTE that code inside your listing description. Easy!

Unfortunately YouTube doesn’t give the “use old embed code” option anymore which leaves only their default embedding code active. The problem is that it is an iFrame code – something that eBay does not support. So you can’t simply copy & paste this iFrame embed code into your listings… as nothing will show up!

Luckily there’s a pretty quick and easy workaround – you have to manually edit the old embed code with the video you want to play. This will require some HTML editing skills BUT please don’t be put off by this – it’s actually a very easy task and I’ll show you exactly, step by step, what you need to do to get this done. If necessary, please go over this guide as many times as needed and just practice until you get the hang of it.

Step 1 – Getting the YouTube video identifier.

First thing you need to do is find the unique identifier that each video on YouTube carries. What you do is simply locate the video you want to use in your eBay listing and copy/save the unique code each video has. You can find it in two ways:

1) When you’re on the video page, check your browser’s address bar. It will look something like this:

The part you need to copy is 11 characters that follows the “?v=” part, in my example it is:

4-GK099ZQJg

It will always be located in the same place, directly after “?v=”

2) Alternatively, you can click on the Share button right below the video – where a shortened URL of that video shows up, like this:

Again, as you can see, it has the same 11 character code as in the full URL: 4-GK099ZQJg

It doesn’t matter which method of these 2 you use as the unique identifier (11 character code) is exactly the same either way.

At this stage simply copy the 11 character code and save it in Notepad.

Step 2 – Setting Up the Embedding Code

As I said, previously this step was not necessary as YouTube provided us with a ready to use HTML embed code to paste on eBay; now it’s not an option so we have to create the code on our own. Not from scratch of course! Here’s a ready to use code that works:

<p align=”center”>
</span></strong></p>

(Click Here to Download this code in a notepad file.)

You can’t use it without some slight editing though.

Please note that in two places in the code there are 11 Xs, right? These are the places you want to put the unique identifier code that you got from the YouTube video you want to embed. So simply copy this default code into notepad and then replace the XXXXXXXXXX part in BOTH places with the code from YouTube.

So the final version in my example would look like this:

<p align=”center”>
</span></strong></p>

Don’t forget that you need to replace the code in TWO places, otherwise it won’t work.

IMPORTANT!!!! All this work with HTML code and video identifiers should be done in NOTEPAD and nothing else! Don’t use WORD, email or any other WYSIWYG type of editor; use only plain Notepad so you get clean code with no unnecessary formatting added to it.

Also within the code you should see the video size settings, again in two places, which is of course the code that is responsible for the size of the video. It looks like this in case you’re having trouble finding it:

height=”385″ width=”640″

Very easy – the first number is the video height (385 pixels in my example) and the second one is width (640 pixels in my example).

In most cases you can leave these as is, as it is a good sized video, suitable for most listings and products. BUT if you need a larger OR smaller video, you can definitely change these parameters as you want. Just keep 2 things in mind:

• Change dimensions/size in BOTH locations of code, so they’re exactly the same.
• Keep the aspect ratio of 16:9.

The second point means that you can’t simply take any number you want and put it in the code. Well, you can do that but then video will look skewed and out of proportion. You must maintain the 16:9 aspect ratio for the video to look good.

Here are some common video sizes you can use:

• 1280 (width) x 720 (height)
• 853 (width) x 480 (height)

Just make sure that the video fits your listing template!!! Anything above 800 pixels in width will probably be too much for most templates. Also, you want to check what quality settings are available for that video on YouTube – you don’t want to use a bigger size than is available as then the video will not look sharp.

Lastly, if you need a CUSTOM size, simply click on Embed > Embed underneath the video, then click on Show More and in the Video Size box select CUSTOM Size. There you can enter any width or height number you want and YouTube will automatically calculate the other to maintain the 16:9 aspect ratio. Then you can simply use these numbers and edit the embed code accordingly.

So far so good? Great! Next step is to insert this code into your listing.

Step 3 – Adding YouTube Code to Your eBay Listing

With the code edited and ready for use, you simply go to your product listing (newly created or an existing one) and paste this code inside the description area, in the exact place you want the video to show up.

It doesn’t matter whether you use eBay directly, Turbo Lister, Aactiva or any other listing tool – the principles and steps remain exactly the same. So here’s what you need to do:

1) In Design mode, find the place where you want to insert the video and click your cursor there. If you want the video to be centered, make sure to click the centre button too.

2) Type some short text there, like XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. We do this so that it’s easier to find the place you want to put the video when you’re in HTML mode:

3) Switch to HTML mode and find where you entered the place holder text (in my example – XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX). Delete that text and simply copy and paste the video embed code you prepared in Notepad:

4) Switch to Preview mode to see if the video shows up and save your work! If using Turbo Lister, it may take a few seconds for the video to show up in Preview mode, that’s perfectly fine. Sometimes you even have to Refresh the page (Right Click > Refresh) for the video to load, but don’t worry as that’s only happening on Turbo Lister and not the actual listing when it goes live:

That’s all there is to it really – if you follow my instructions to the letter, it should work without any problems. If the video does not show up, most likely you have made an error in creating the embed code. It could be that you left a space after the identifier or copied/pasted one character too many. Just check the code carefully or simply start from scratch.

If you’re not using your own video, before choosing another, make sure to check whether that video is embeddable at all as some videos are not. You can easily check this by going to the video page on YouTube and clicking on the embed button. If Embedding is disabled, it will be shown there.

Obviously, using your OWN video is the best way to go here as then you can actively promote your brand, your product, have your logo in the video etc. etc. Also, with your own videos, you can disable ADS in your YouTube channel which is a big plus.

I hope this tutorial is simple enough to follow but if you have any questions or need help with specific steps, like setting the size, feel free to post them below in the comments box.

Thanks,
Andrew