eBay

ricarmic · ‎04-12-2016

As I'm converting my descriptions down to the new under 800 character count (counting line breaks as 50 characters) I'm experiencing deja vu!

For those of us "old" enough or those still doing stuff in the print world, this exercise of keeping things short and meaningful is so very much like my building "classified word ad" days.... where one had to try to fit as much into a 25 word ad as they possibly could, or pay the 50c per extra word! (as a note, I actually still do run print ads in real paper magazines, imagine that!)

Anyway as you can see by my distracting myself by posting this I'm not having fun doing it.... guess I'd better get back to it.....

xeposter · ‎04-13-2016

@ricarmic wrote:
As I'm converting my descriptions down to the new under 800 character count (counting line breaks as 50 characters) I'm experiencing deja vu!

For those of us "old" enough or those still doing stuff in the print world, this exercise of keeping things short and meaningful is so very much like my building "classified word ad" days.... where one had to try to fit as much into a 25 word ad as they possibly could, or pay the 50c per extra word! (as a note, I actually still do run print ads in real paper magazines, imagine that!)

Anyway as you can see by my distracting myself by posting this I'm not having fun doing it.... guess I'd better get back to it.....

Ric,

You said that you are converting your descriptions to 800 characters. You do know that the descriptions do not have to be changed, right?

http://community.ebay.ca/t5/Weekly-Chat-Session/April-13th-2016-Weekly-Session/m-p/334404#M3985.

Alex

This is my POSTING id.

ricarmic · ‎04-13-2016

Hi Alex!

Yes I understand that they can be left as long as we like, however if one leaves it longer than 800 characters then eBay takes it upon themselves to reduce it to 250 characters for the description summary (ie for mobile etc devices). Based on past experience with that concept, I'm choosing to make all my new listings under 800 chararcters so that the eBay summarizing for me does not happen.

I am doing this because I agree with eBay's direction that more and more people are buying via phones, or tablets based on how many messages etc I am getting from buyers that are from a phone or tablet.

In the long run it is going to make my life a lot easier, and as you've probably seen in other threads, there is only seemingly a small percentage of people who even read anything in the description anyway.

Thank you for posting this though!