posted on March 31, 2001 04:50:22 PM new
I've been using Ebay for quite some time now and decided to try Amazon auctions.
When pasting my HTML from MS Word into my descriptions I'm getting error messages from Amazon. Apparently, they don't allow 'style sheets' in your description which word automatically inserts.
My description is very long and I don't know HTML well enough to try and redo my sales description piece by piece. Any suggestions?
posted on April 1, 2001 10:15:55 PM new
You get 4,000 characters with amazon for an ad - they just eliminate everything you listed below 4,000 characters in your ad.
I used to use tables to describe books consistently, but tables used too many characters - no room left for book description.
posted on April 2, 2001 01:40:14 PM new
Hi, I'm not sure how Word sets up style sheets... As a seperate file linked to the html page, or with the the style info in the <head> ... </head>, or last as an "inline" style which would be included in the tag itself? But if amazon doesn't allow ANY type of styles your only way to be would be to format by regular html tags.
The auctions that I put up use a very simple table to make two columns with the image in the first and the description down the second. I checked and an average length auction had 1578 characters with 545 of those being the title, description and shipping info. The table was done by hand though, not in a WYSIWYG editor.
With a "What You See Is What You Get" editor it is VERY easy to go over 4000 characters because the price you pay for being able to move the images and text around on the screen in your page, and then just save the results, puts MANY layers of tables inside of tables and LOTS of proprietary tags and garbage that will bring the character count way up unfortunately.
So the advice I have, which you probably might not want to hear, is get a newbie html book -- the visual quickstart guides from peachtree press are good to learn from -- and practice a little table building. If you're going to be putting up a good number of auctions it would be worth it to spend the time to get an auction "template" that you could just add new pictures and descriptions to for new items. Design wise it'll also help people recognize your auctions from the rest if they're similar looking when they're clicking through the masses of other similar items.
posted on April 3, 2001 09:22:30 AM new
I use just basic HTML in my Amazon listings, changing text size, color, italics, bold, bullets, lists, breaks, paragraphs. I use a listing program for my other sites. When I transferred my listings over to Amazon from eBay, I found I could not use all the pretty bells and whistles. Each ad had to be edited to delete the excessive HTML that Amazon just did not recognize. It was more than the ad being too long. I used Front Page to edit the ads, came up with a set form that I use.
Selling books, music, videos, art on the internet...Thank you for your business! Marilyn
posted on April 3, 2001 09:37:41 AM new
Thanks for everyone for the replies. It's the 4000 character limit that hurts. On Ebay, I was actually able to include a sales letter for an info product with 4100 words. Taking it down to 4000 characters will require one heck of an editing job.
I'm learning FrontPage at the moment because I'm putting my own site up but I also have "Teach Yourself HTML 4 inn a Week" so I'm going to go through that as well.
Ironically, Ebay shut down my auctions last weekend because I was listing in categories that targeted my particular customers rather than in an info product category. Also, my auction included an e-mail address for people to contact if they had any questions. Apparently, this is a violation of Ebay policy.
posted on April 3, 2001 10:01:00 AM new
may I suggest an alternative?
You may add images that include as many character as you want...as an example...look at this image I composed in Power Point...
http://www.pcalton.com/shipping.jpg
there is not much of limit to what text you want to put into your listing with one small image source.
My Amazon listings appear to have many more than 4000 characters of html but they don't because I use images with text whenever possible.
If you get a chance take a look at some of my Amazon listings and you can see what I am talking about...hope this helps.
posted on April 12, 2001 01:05:14 AM new
I too, have run into HTML problems with Amazon and I wasn't using a style sheet. It happened while trying to post my first ad through AW. Error message said they didn't like some of my tags or something. The "or something" is the big problem because I wasn't given any clue what was wrong or where. I don't know what support they offer when an ad is placed directly with them, but I know there isn't any when going through AW. They just suggest looking in places like this, wherein I haven't found an answer yet.
The same ad was accepted by eBay with no problems. I didn't re-try posting it again in Amazon. A seller shouldn't have to be a programing guru to list an ad in any auction. Maybe that's the reason Amazon has had so many problems lately.
posted on April 13, 2001 02:57:16 PM new
I had the same problem with amazon. The html for the auctions was as vanilla as it gets. It rejected something like 9 out of 12 auctions and no pics in the ones that did make it.
This is something to do with amazon because the exact same html works perfect on ebay and OK on yahoo. (they way they copy tables in screws up sometimes and paragraphs of description gets dropped).
