Creating Better-Looking Item Listings

     

Now it's time for the fun stuff ”making your item listings look more attractive. Yes, we're talking style over substance, but style draws the eyeballs. So let's look at the various ways you can make your listings stand out from eBay's standard plain-text listings.

eBay's Listing Designer

We'll start with the listing templates that are available with eBay's Listing Designer. As you can see in Figure 18.6, Listing Designer is available to all users from the Sell Your Item page ”providing you pay the extra 10 cents per listing to use it.

Figure 18.6. Any seller can use eBay's Listing Designer to choose a template for their item listing.

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Listing Designer provides more than two dozen predesigned templates, which eBay calls themes . You choose a theme from the Select a Theme list, and then choose a layout for your pictures from the Select a Layout list. Listing Designer is easy to use, and requires no additional software or ongoing subscription.

eBay Turbo Lister

The same themes that are available in Listing Designer are also available in eBay's Turbo Lister bulk listing software (pages.ebay.com/turbo_lister/). You choose your template on the Design Your Listing screen, shown in Figure 18.7. As you learned in Chapter 11, Turbo Lister is available free of charge ”making it the listing creation software of choice for cost-conscious sellers.

Figure 18.7. Apply a theme to all your bulk listings with eBay Turbo Lister.

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Third-Party Listing Tools

When it comes to creating great-looking item listings, you're not limited to eBay's "official" listing creation tools. There are a plethora of listing creation programs and services available, all of which provide a variety of predesigned templates you can use for your item listings.

Most of these tools work in a similar fashion. You go to a particular Web page or program screen, select a template from a list, choose available layout options, and then enter your normal listing title and description.

For example, the Design Center section of the Web-based ndale Lister ( www. andale .com ) lets you choose from dozens of templates (which ndale calls themes), in five general categories: Category Specific, Gallery/Store, Holiday/Seasonal, Basic, and Other. Vendio Sales Manager (www. vendio .com) offers a Template Workshop, that lets you customize an equally large selection of category-specific templates.

ndale and Vendio are just two of the many companies offering listing creation tools. Most of the major auction management sites (described in Chapter 20, "Using Professional Auction Tools") include template-driven listing creation tools as part of their overall services. In addition, the following standalone tools let you create sophisticated eBay auction listings:

  • Adomatic Professional (www.slconsultancy.co.uk/adomatic/)

  • Auction Lizard (www.auction- lizard .com)

  • Auctiva Poster (www. auctiva .com)

  • Dominant Ad Creator (dac.volcanicsoft.com)

  • EZAd (www.etusa.com/auction/atrix.htm)

Comparing Listing Templates

Let's compare of some of the different templates available with these listing tools. Admittedly, template choice and design is somewhat subjective , so you'll have to trust my decisions here. What I've done is chosen templates appropriate to an item listing for a DVD movie, to give you an idea of what you might expect from the major listing creation tools. Figure 18.8 shows the Entertainment template available with eBay Listing Designer and Turbo Lister, Figure 18.9 shows the Movies template from ndale Lister, and Figure 18.10 shows The Show template from Vendio Sales Manager. As you can see, the listings vary wildly in look and feel, even though they all present similar information. Of course, other templates are available, and (with some) you can do a degree of tweaking to personalize the final listing. In any case, it behooves you to test drive a particular listing creation tool before you commit; it's definitely a matter of personal taste!

Figure 18.8. eBay's Entertainment template.

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Figure 18.9. ndale's Movies template.

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Figure 18.10. Vendio's The Show template.

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Absolute Beginner's Guide to Launching an eBay Business
Absolute Beginners Guide to Launching an eBay Business
ISBN: 0789730588
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 167

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