Horizontal Scrolling

What's the easiest way to get rid of the Horizontal Scrolling Error when creating a listing? I make my listings on a PC and look fine when I display.  Have no personal requirement to have a Smart Phone so unable to view in that format.

 

-CM

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Re: Horizontal Scrolling

The Advanced Listing form has a tool that allows you to check and fix listings. Revise and look for it. Write back if you can’t find it.
Message 2 of 11
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Re: Horizontal Scrolling

Ebay's mobile friendly checker adds a line of code at the beginning of the description, something like this.....

<font rwr="1" style="font-family:Arial" size="4"><meta name="viewport"  content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

Personally I use "size=3" which I believe is 12 pt font text rather than the very large "size =4" which ebay is recommending.

Hope this helps but really your best bet is to test your description on various mobile browsers first before rushing to make changes that may not be necessary.
I believe there are apps that can be loaded on desktop pcs that emulate mobile browsers...a Google search might help to locate something suitable.... I've never bothered with them myself.

Message 3 of 11
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Re: Horizontal Scrolling

I use the advanced listing tool currently. That's the item description checker? Mobile friendly checker. Meta tag repair is not an issue. There is no active content or Non-compliant links. I do not see a fix for Horizontal Scrolling.

 

-CM

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Re: Horizontal Scrolling

I tried updating with that line of text and still get the same error. 

Horizontal scrolling

Avoid buyers having to spend extra time horizontally scrolling on mobile devices to read your description.

The simulated phone display beside it looks fine.

-CM

 

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Re: Horizontal Scrolling

QUOTE
I tried updating with that line of text and still get the same error. 
Horizontal scrolling
Avoid buyers having to spend extra time horizontally scrolling on mobile devices to read your description.
The simulated phone display beside it looks fine.
-CM

OK, I've browsed a few of your listing descriptions using my cell phone. Your descriptions are fine, they are centered with no scrolling required to read. The text is very large though, imo it would be more visually appealing to use a slightly smaller font size... looks like you've used the mobile friendly tool which sets the font size to large.

A Note: The mobile friendly checker found on the listing form applies to the listing description only, any changes made there apply only to the listing description, nothing else.

Now, there IS a horizontal scrolling issue when I browse your store's homepage. On mobile the gallery view is 3 items wide, on my phone I can only view 2 of the 3 without scrolling horizontally. If I pinch my screen smaller so all 3 fit without scrolling then the page will adjust and scrolling is no longer required. Off the top of my head I don't know what might cause your store homepage to behave that way. It doesn't look like you're using any sort of custom store template so I'm puzzled. My phone browser doesn't generally have any trouble displaying ebay stores. Regardless, the scrolling error does not appear to be a terribly severe one, at least not on my browser.

I'm not clear as to where you are encountering the scrolling error ??

Hope this helps a tiny bit.
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Re: Horizontal Scrolling

I clicked on your Berlitz Spanish listing and 'pretended' to list something similar and clicked on mobile friendly checker.  It said that horizontal scrolling was ok but this is what came up.......

 

Your listing isn’t quite mobile-friendly. Let’s fix it!

  • Viewport meta tag incorrect or missing

    This tag should be included in the header for the font size in your item description to be legible on a mobile device. 

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1. 

 

Message 7 of 11
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Re: Horizontal Scrolling

Also, ebay is doing an upcoming webinar on this subject: https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/8991317195610841857

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Re: Horizontal Scrolling

Thanks. Will update. Was an old listing I just relisted. Bypassed that step in the process. Maybe if it came up as an error message before you completed the listing it could get caught. The other way of looking at it is smart phones should be compatible with computers and not the other way around. Hey, just a thought. 🙂

-CM

Message 9 of 11
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Re: Horizontal Scrolling

Follow up.
Checked the Berlitz listing and that line of text was in there. No errors noted.
Maybe you found a new glitch?
-CM
Message 10 of 11
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Re: Horizontal Scrolling

@lotzofuniquegoodies

 

I bulk scanned your 247 listings for mobile size on this tool:

http://www.isdntek.com/ebaytools/MobileSizeChecker.htm

 

It appears that at least 18 listings have a hard-coded width that can not be overcome by any of eBay's fix-it tools.

 

For instance, listing 401497074767 contains this bit of code:

<div class="a-row a-spacing-micro singleton" style="width: 449.74px;

Since eBay tests for mobile devices as small as 320px, we can see that 449.74px will not fit. You can revise that listing and change the HTML code to:

<div class="a-row a-spacing-micro singleton" style="width: auto;

Whatever editing tool was used to create those listings has added a lot of CSS styles, including the hard-coded widths.

 

I have written a filter for you that will find hard-coded widths and make the above change within the Sandbox tool. Click this link to load the first of your 18 items:

http://www.isdntek.com/ebaytools/ActiveContentSandbox.htm

 

If you want to scroll down through the "Markup" tab on the Sandbox tool, you will see the color-coded corrections the tool will make. That display is informational only and you won't use it for anything.

 

Click to the "Filtered" tab to see the corrected HTML. That corrected HTML can be pasted back into the HTML tab of eBay's editor to fix your listings.

 

Then you can go through this list of oversized red items that the bulk scanner found. Paste each new item number into the top box of the Sandbox tool that already has your custom filter, click SCAN to run it through that same filter, and scroll down to pick up your corrected code from the "Filtered" tab and paste into eBay.

 

152880848809
152883591983
152883803000
152891765539
152893023712
152915231471
152915242966
152919020119
401485136247
401485138133
401487626618
401492480937
401492959591
401493476796
401497079998
401497112900
401497151782

 

Mobile devices can display a desktop-sized web page by shrinking the page to fit onto the small screen width. This results in some very tiny text, so the visitor would need to zoom in to a tiny area of the screen to read the text.  This is called "pinch and zoom" because of the two fingered gesture to accomplish it. 

 

eBay's fix-it tool will add a viewport meta tag to the top of your description to tell the browser the page is mobile friendly.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

That tag by itself does not make a listing mobile friendly. That tag merely tells the browser that you have already made a mobile friendly page (by eliminating hard-coded widths and by making embedded images flexible and by allowing components to wrap where needed).  That tag tells the browser it does not need to shrink the page to fit (instead, display at an initial scale of 1 to 1 —no shrink).  But, if the page has not been made mobile friendly , the browser will be forced to add scrollbars because it is not allowed to shrink. So, if you see scrollbars on a mobile device, that means the viewport meta tag was added without first making the page mobile friendly.

 

Sellers who create a plain text listing don't need to be concerned with adding the viewport meta tag because plain text wraps automatically. However, sellers can inadvertantly clobber plain text flexibility by holding down the space bar (or most other keys) to create a run of characters, so avoid using that method for formatting or decoration. Another common problem is bumping the text size up so much that a long word will not fit across the mobile screen, so just use normal font sizes. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is definitely out without adding some soft hyphens.

 

If you need help with any of the compliance tools on this page, or with Active Content and these types of mobile viewport issues, I can usually be found on this US forum http://community.ebay.com/t5/Replacing-Active-Content/bd-p/activecontent

 

 

 

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