Using Pictures in Your Auction Listings
| This isn't the place to go into the details on how to take great product photos; there are whole books devoted to that subject. Instead I'm going to focus on the mechanics of placing your photos within your item listings, and then present 20 templates that incorporate various types of photo displays. Editing Your PhotosI'm going to assume that you've taken at least one really good photo of the item you're selling. The photo should be properly focused, composed so that the item is up front and center, big enough so you can see the necessary details, and properly lit so that it's neither too bright or too dark. Note To learn more about taking great eBay product photos, check out Shooting for Dollars: Simple Photo Techniques for Greater eBay Profits by Sally Wiener Grotta and Daniel Grotta (Peachpit Press, 2005). If your photo isn't quite perfect, you need to use a photo-editing program to do some touch-up work. There are lots of good photo editors out there, the most popular of which include:
To make your life a little easier, we've included a free copy of IrfanView on the CD that accompanies this book. This is a great program, very versatile, and very popular among experienced eBay sellers. You can use this program to do all manner of basic editing, including cropping, adjusting brightness and contrast, sharpening fuzzy edges, and so on. Use it to do both major and minor touchups before you insert your photos into your auction listings. Sizing Your PhotosYou can also use IrfanView to resize your photos for use in your auction listings. It's important that your photos aren't too small or too bigthey need to be just right to display efficiently in your listings. Most pictures you take in a digital camera will come out too big to display in a web browser without scrolling, which is why you typically have to resize the photo to fit within the confines of a normal web page. eBay recommends that you size your image to no more than 400 pixels wide by 300 pixels high. I think that's unnecessarily small, especially if you need to show fine detail, but you still need to keep in mind the resolution of a typical computer display. Caution Resizing your photos is particularly important if you use eBay Picture Services, which will compress any larger pictures to fit within the 300 x 400 restriction. The results of this compression can be rather yucky-looking, which is one more reason not to use eBay Picture Services. A good number of eBay users have their monitors set for 800 x 600 resolution, which means you need your photos to fit within these dimensionsno more than 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels high. And that's the max; you should probably try not to exceed 600 x 400, if you can. You also need to optimize the file size of your images so that they don't take forever for people to download. This is especially important for your potential buyers who are using older computers, or are on a slower dial-up Internet connection. My recommendation is to keep your file size below 50KB, which results in reasonable downloads for most users. To reduce the file size, you can either resize the width and height or reduce the resolution (in pixels per inch). Most image editing software lets you perform either of these operations. Embedding Images vs. Standard eBay ImagesNow we come to the challenge of how to include your photos in your eBay item listings. I mentioned earlier that you could use eBay Picture Services, although this is less than an ideal solution. For one, eBay will charge you 15 cents for each picture you use, after the first. Second, when you use eBay Picture Services with your own customized auction template, the photos get inserted after your fancy item listing. So if you want to use auction templates that incorporate photos within the description itself, you need to embed those images in the HTML code for the description. This requires you to host your photos on a separate website, and then point to the URLs of those photos within the HTML code. In other words, you can't use the templates offered in this chapter if you use eBay's standard Picture Services hosting. You have to find another website to host your photos. Finding a Picture HostWhen it comes to picture hosting, you have a lot of options. First, if you have your own personal page on the web, you can probably upload your pictures to that web server. For example, if you have a personal page on Yahoo! GeoCities or Tripod, you should be able to upload your images to that site. If you don't have a personal page but could have a personal page (via America Online or your Internet service provider), that's another potential place for you to upload picture files. If the company you work for has a web server, there's a chance it will let you use a little space there. Tip eBay also offers a subscription-based picture hosting service, dubbed eBay Picture Manager. Picture Manager works a lot like a third-party picture host; you can store up to 50MB of image files for $9.99 per month, 125MB for $19.99 per month, or 300MB for $39.99 per month. (Prices are slightly less if you have an eBay Store.) Then there are the dedicated picture hosting websites that offer a variety of picture hosting services, typically for a small feealong the lines of $5 or so per month for 10MB or more of storage. This would let you store 200 images at a time, for less than half of what eBay would charge. Here are some of the most popular of these sites:
When you use a picture hosting service, you need to upload your picture files to the service before you create your eBay auction listings. The picture host will provide a URL for each photo you upload; you use that URL within the HTML code for your auction template, to point to the photos you want to use. |
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