Custom Pages

[thecoinhunterca]

In Ebay's assnine tradition of doing dumb self serving stuff, Ebay removed the use of custom pages in stores. Anyone have a slick way of doing terms & conditions outrside of the listings?    

[richardcm]

Most seller terms and conditions are usually not enforceable. eBay terms and conditions override most of what a seller could want as terms.

Having terms and conditions as a custom store page is not very useful since  a buyer would have to click on it to see it. Buyers rarely read descriptions today let alone click a link.

This is the new eBay reality today. 

All you can do is add a few lines of information in the item description to help a buyer. As long as they do not contradict eBay terms.

[thecoinhunterca]

Could't disagree more. Terms and conditions provide additional information to the buyer. They provide clear information about collecting taxes for example which change from time to time. The whole idea of having the custom page capability is that iftax rates or other dynamic items or terms have changed, one could easly makes those changes once on the custom page as opposed to 500 listings indivdually.

[thecoinhunterca]

Secondly, We use a platform that provides tools. We use those tools to generate business and revenue. We set up our listing models around them. Often Ebay disregards that and just changes things with complete disregard for the impact it may have on people using the platform. At the very least some backwards compatability should have been offerred for this issue. 

[reallynicestamps]

The whole idea of having the custom page capability is that iftax rates or other dynamic items or terms have changed, one could easly makes those changes once on the custom page as opposed to 500 listings indivdually.

I have a standard ToS that is part of my Description.

This is a chunk of boilerplate with some HTML  that I keep in a folder on my desktop.

If you look at any of my listings you can see my way of dealing with this. Everything below "We prefer Paypal...." is standard.

• It is also on my Templates, but I found that clunky.

When I make up a new description, I write it in one text document, add coding as needed, most of which is in the same text document as the ToS then copy/paste in the ToS. Then the whole description is copy/paste into the SYI form.
I suppose you could do it with TurboLister too, although eBay no longer supports that, I understand.

Although we've been selling on eBay since 1998, I don't think I've ever seen any other way of dealing with ToS.  Either they are part of the Description or they are on the Shipping page.

FWIW, the sales tax levels are linked on your Shipping page.

As @richardcm  says, most ToS are overridden by eBay and Paypal policies. Information about which province's sales taxes you charge would be the only thing I can think of that would be necessary to add, and if you have your listings set up right, those would both be charged automatically, but would change when there are changes to that province's sales taxes.

No Returns doesn't mean No Refunds, for example.

And the seller is responsible for delivery not the shipper he sub-contracts to.

Since your request that buyers look at a specialized page for ToS, and that takes me to your Store, perhaps it's time to start by writing up the information your customer needs and adding the boilerplate to today's closing lisitings.
If you do just ten a day, they will all be changed by February.

[hlmacdon]

Some of the third party listing services have this capability via listing templates. They are dynamically applied to a listing so if you update the template content it updates any listings it is attached to automatically. I've found that the best way to tackle the problem of having to periodically update content and not have to edit every listing manually.

[thecoinhunterca]

Bottom line is that your listings still do not have dynamic content. Other than that look and feel, templates don't do anything to solve this problem. The idea is to have the ability to deal with dunamic content within EXISTING listings. The custom pages was a good workaround. The response below your's makes more sense but the 3rd party Ebay listing providers have gone off the deep end with their costs.    

[hlmacdon]

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@thecoinhunterca wrote:

Bottom line is that your listings still do not have dynamic content. Other than that look and feel, templates don't do anything to solve this problem. The idea is to have the ability to deal with dunamic content within EXISTING listings. The custom pages was a good workaround. The response below your's makes more sense but the 3rd party Ebay listing providers have gone off the deep end with their costs.    

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The pricing is problematic given how much some have raised costs. Most are looking at multichannel integrations as they don't seem to want to rely on ebay long term as their sole revenue source. Some services very specifically were catering to multi-account dropshippers and helping them circumvent....things...but now that they are getting cracked down on those listing providers are seeking alternative income streams. As one raises prices the rest tend to follow with these things.

The provider I've used for the last few years (Inkfrog) allows you to have a static item description with a dynamic template that can be appended to that.  That allows you to separate out policy/notice/shipping/etc information from your item description and update it dynamically as needed. Handy for posting notices about holiday shipping schedule changes, changes when shipping costs rollover annually and so forth. You have to be selling enough to justify another recurring annual cost, but in terms of time saving that feature along with having all listing inventory/photos managed centrally makes it pretty worthwhile. If I had to use ebay listing tools the ROI for time spent here would be lower.

Things were a bit easier when ebay was more flexible with active content as there were providers catering to this need at a lower price point. Alas that was also an easy way for malicious types to target ebay users.

[swagger-like-me-ca]

Can the API be used to edit HTML between 2 comment tags for example? So i want to have a message box in my description. Then i would make the change on my own website and it would use the API to go through all my listings and edit the html to reflect the new message or simply delete it.