134. Add Pictures to Your Auction BEFORE YOU BEGIN 128 About the eBay Sell Your Item Page 129 Start the Sell Form and Choose a Category 130 Write the Title and Description 131 Format Your Description with eBay's HTML Editor 132 Choose Pricing, Duration, and Location
SEE ALSO 138 About Digital Pictures and eBay
A picture is worth a thousand wordsand helps you sell the goods. It's a simple fact that when you include a picture in your auction, the item has a better chance of sellingand selling for more moneythan if no picture is included. eBay makes including pictures in your auctions easy. However, if you want to get the most out of your auction pictures, turn to Chapter 20, "Power Tips for Handling Digital Auction Pictures." | 1. | Take a Picture You'll need a picture of your item, and the picture has to be in a digital format. Use a digital camera, a regular camera, or a scanner to get your picture in a digital format: - Take a photograph using a digital camera Digital cameras are an excellent way to get pictures into your computer. They store pictures on their own hard disks or memory sticks. After you take the pictures, you transfer them to your computer.
134. Add Pictures to Your Auction
- Take a photograph with a regular camera and put it into your computer with a scanner You can buy a good-quality scanner for $100 or less. Scanners do a good job of converting a normal photograph into an image of a high-enough quality that you can put it on your website.
TIP For images intended for use on the Web (as are eBay picture files), you don't need super-high resolution. A resolution of 72dpi is sufficient for most web purposes and ensures a picture file size that's small enough to be downloaded quickly by most viewers ' browsers. - Take a photograph with a regular camera and ask that the photos be made available online or on a CD When you fill out a form to have your photos developed, the photo developer gives you the option of creating a photo CD or making the images available online. Select one of these options as an easy way to get auction pictures without having to spend any money for hardware.
| | 2. | Choose the Right Format Pictures posted on eBay generally should be in one of two formats: GIF (which stands for Graphical Interchange Format) or JPEG (which stands for Joint Picture Experts Group). Files in the GIF format end in a .gif extension; files in the JPEG format end in a .jpg extension. Graphics programs and other software give you a choice of formats in which to save image files, and just about all of them let you save files in either of these formats. Digital cameras, on the other hand, frequently save files only as JPEGs. Both formats compress the graphics files so they aren't too large to be easily displayed on the Web. If graphics are large, they take a long time to download and web surfing slows to a crawl. Either format works fine for your graphics, but if you want your graphics to provide the maximum impact, you should know the following about each format: - JPEG Does a better job of compressing photographs and art with fine detail and gradations, so choose it if you'll be putting a photograph or detailed image on your auction page. JPEG doesn't do as well with high-contrast images, such as line art.
- GIF Works best for line art, cartoons, and similar graphics, so choose it for these types of pictures. GIF is not as good as JPEG for displaying photographs.
| | 3. | Add the Picture After you have the picture you want to use, you're ready to add it to your auction. On the Picture & Details page of the Sell Your Item form, scroll to the bottom of the page to the EBay Picture Services section. Click the Add Picture button and select the picture you want to add to your auction. The photo continues to live on your hard disk, but a copy of it is uploaded to eBay. NOTE If you haven't started the Sell Your Item form yet, back up to 129 Start the Sell Form and Choose a Category to learn how to begin the process of creating an auction listing. You'll see a thumbnail of your picture on the page when you're done. You can crop the photo by dragging its corner or sides, and you can rotate it 90 ‚ ° by clicking the photo's upper-right corner. eBay hosts your photo when you add a photo this way. The first photo you use is free, but additional photos cost $0.15 each. If you don't want to use the eBay picture service, you can instead link to a photo you have stored somewhere on the Webfor example, if your Internet service provider gives you storage space, you could upload all your eBay pictures to this space. To use photos stored on some other online web server, click the Your Own Web Hosting link and type the URL to your picture. | | 4. | Choose a Picture Layout Choose the layout for your picture. Standard layout is free and is good for most auctions. However, you can instead select a Slide Show layout, which shows multiple views of your item and costs $0.75. You can also have Supersize Pictures layout, which lets you display large pictures over 440x330 pixels and also costs $0.75 extra, or you can select a Picture Pack , which includes up to six pictures, lets you supersize them, and gives you a gallery feature to provide your picture with wider exposure. TIP For more information about the gallery, see 135 Choose Auction Extras . | | 5. | Preview Your Auction
When you're done making your picture selections, click Preview Your Listing . You have to wait a short while as your picture is uploaded to eBay; then you see a preview of your entire auction page, including your picture. Click Close Window to return to the Sell Your Item form pages.
| TIP Click the Back button at the bottom of the Sell Your Item form page (not your browser's Back button) to back up through the pages of the Sell Your Item form if you decide to make changes to earlier selections you've made. Click the Continue button to advance through the pages of the form. If you instead use your browser's Back and Forward buttons , you can lose all the information you entered into your auction page.
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