What I don't like about eBid...

[aftech]

Descriptions are limited to 500000 bytes, or ~500k. This is a huge allowance that no-one should even really get close to.

If you were told anything about 4000 characters then the support staff member was incorrect.

If the WYSYIWYG editor is not working correctly for you then the Plain HTML Box would suit you better, this does not format your code.

Can you give me a ticket ID where the 4000 characters were mentioned and as always details and specifics of the description you are having trouble using. If warnings are being shown incorrectly it is a bug that we need to fix.

Thanks
Gazza

They actually said 40000 not 4000.
Ticket ID: 53713
This is what the support said: "The maximum auction description length is 40,000 - some imported auctions may not be
compatible with our editor.
If you have listed the item please advise the auction ID of the item and we will review."
Note that this response says "40000 of length", the help page says "500000 characters", and you said "500000 bytes". The limitation is definitely not 500000 characters. I'm not sure why there are two different numbers, 40,000 and 500,000.

[aftech]

Actually, I suggested setting up a default in your 'Defaults' area which you could then load and edit within eBid when creating a new listing. I would NEVER suggest pasting anything from Word into an already bloated field.

It worked anyway, don't worry. But I usually strip formatting.

[aftech]

If the description is too large an error screen appears when you hit preview advising of a 40,000 character limit. This was displaying correctly this morning. I think either a '0' was missed in the email or it was misread.

Really? I never see this error message.

[gazlannathai]

Why not pull your specs in using your own web space and an inline frame?

Because Google will reject the listing - Google product search does not allow XSS scripting.

It also does not allow terms of sale and shipping descriptions, nor special offers within the listing - any found to have such information are automatically rejected by the Google product search bots. Until now, this has not been a great source of worry for me as I'm not in a Google Product Search country, but as of next month, everything I list as UK-located will have to comply with both eBid's and Google's terms of use in order to be presented in product search.

On that note, strictly speaking, Google's rules apply only to currency country - therefore your items and business could actually be in Timbuctoo, and as long as the display currency is GBP, USD, Euro, they will add it to product search. Da Boyz are actually doing a service to their additional countries by failing to perform a currency conversion for inclusion by Google (it's only five lines of code to do so - and I have it on all my own websites with Google being perfectly happy about that).

They're also doing a disservice to the eBid community as a whole, because by failing to do the currency conversion for Google submission, they're excluding a lot of products that non-members may be looking for, and who would thus be drawn to eBid by finding them on Google and join the site to buy them. There are times when I think eBid not only has applied the brakes to the growth engine, but have chocked the wheels and chained the rear axle to a lamp post. Some policies certainly don't seem to make sense in the ecommerce race for growth and market share.

Gaz

[gazlannathai]

Looking at the code way up this page, I would suggest someone needs to spend some time on the W3Schools website - in particular the CSS section (it's all free and includes working examples).

There is zero short-handing in that code - you don't need all those margin = 0 codes because the default for an undefined margin (or padding or border thickness etc) is ZERO - why define what is already default? That's just code bloat of the type that slows page loading and makes people hit the back button.

[bykimbo]

Because Google will reject the listing - Google product search does not allow XSS scripting.

I'd hardly call a simple iframe tag "scripting". Does Google? I thought I'd tested this donkey's ages ago and checked that listings with iframes got loaded okay to google, but I'll check again when I've got a minute.

[Juliebabe25]

@Gazzlanathai

You are obviously very up on some subjects.
You have helped me with other posts etc.

Regarding the Google Product Search, your description explains how I was able to get my products (based in New Zealand which is not one of the GPS countries) appear on two US auction sites. It is the currency.

You say Ebid is doing itself and its members a disservice by not including this and imply it is part of their general marketing.
Gazza seems to do a lot of the programming, so perhaps he is just not aware of this, and from what you say, it may be easy to implement.

This would certainly bring in lots more GP searchers and hopefully more members and sales.
Have you mentioned it to Gazza ?

[gazlannathai]

@Kimbo - last time I checked (admittedly before they introduced "Caffeine" last June, any form of frames to provide the product content would result in a non approval for the product - the XML feed has to provide product description without any html - in-text inline image links, frame tags, iframe tags etc are all html. Google will either reject the XML feed, or strip the html as it sees fit (and it switches sanitisation methods near enough daily) therefore inserting iframe tags is pointless - Google will strip the tags and the frame content will get dropped - you'll end up with whatever text was before and after the iframe opening and closing tags, but nothing in the middle.

@Julie - yup, that'll be right. For the last year or two, my listings on Bonanza have been appearing in GPS, but my listings on eBid have not - the reason is simple - Bonanza only uses USD as the currency and submits to google.com's product search, which is their USD products service. eBid submits only listings added to the US site in dollars, the UK site in Sterling, and the German site in Euros (not sure on the last one, but I think they do) - eBid does NOT take the listings from other currency countries and use the existing currency exchange calculations to convert "foreign" listings to Sterling, Dollars, or Euros for upload to Google - it may be part of the deal they have with Google as a preferred partner, but none of the countries outside North America and Europe get their listings uploaded as part of the eBid submission to GPS even though almost all of the required code is already embedded in the site.

This situation, is of course a nonsense. Any owner of an osCommerce shopping cart website can submit to all Google Product Search websites with a simple to implement plugin that utilises the inbuilt multiple currency coding to general multiple XML files, which are then scheduled for pulling from the site by Google's tools as and when the site owner wants them updated.

Currently one of my natively Thai Baht (currency) websites handles all PayPal and moneyBookers currencies - roughly 40 currencies total in their primary "full service" supported currency countries. What the site does, is automatically via a server-side cron job it updates the currencies twice a day to latest exchange rates, then once per day it does a complete inventory dump into separate files for each currency that I've set up a feed to Google Product Search for. Every 7 days, Google's different GPS sites then pulls their own currency's store feed from my site and updates all the products on GPS.

The whole thing is run via a standardised module script - if I want to add another currency feed, I just duplicate the module to a new module name (e.g. google-store-feed-NZD.php), open the file and change the target currency code (e.g. to NZD) and the filename that the output has to be saved to (e.g. google-store-feed-NZD.xml). That takes .... ooooh 5 seconds? Then I add a new cron job on the server - another 5 seconds. Then I go to my account in google and input the path and file name where it can fetch the feed from, tell it when and how often to do it, and save the settings - that's another 10 seconds total. If I faff and fart about, the whole job might take five minutes. There is no programming to do - just to change a couple of settings. I'm sure eBid are set up the same way - it's pretty standard web-wide.

And that's why I cannot understand them not having done it already, unless Google has put the squeeze on them about it.

Gaz

p.s. @Julie - sorry, forgot to say. I haven't mentioned it to Gazza, because having been "grandfathered" into "new eBid" despite being out of territory, I already push my luck enough with the boyz - wouldn't want to push it much further or I'd likely get kicked out.

[bykimbo]

@Kimbo - last time I checked (admittedly before they introduced "Caffeine" last June, any form of frames to provide the product content would result in a non approval for the product - the XML feed has to provide product description without any html - in-text inline image links, frame tags, iframe tags etc are all html. Google will either reject the XML feed, or strip the html as it sees fit (and it switches sanitisation methods near enough daily) therefore inserting iframe tags is pointless - Google will strip the tags and the frame content will get dropped - you'll end up with whatever text was before and after the iframe opening and closing tags, but nothing in the middle.

Are we talking about the same thing? eBid submits entries for Google Shopping, constructing a "description" based on the title and the first 255 characters of the description. As far as I know that's all that goes to Google, which then makes an entry on their products base to link back to the ebid listing. Why would Google give a stuff what happens further down the page?

[aftech]

Are we talking about the same thing? eBid submits entries for Google Shopping, constructing a "description" based on the title and the first 255 characters of the description. As far as I know that's all that goes to Google, which then makes an entry on their products base to link back to the ebid listing. Why would Google give a stuff what happens further down the page?

Do you mean 255 HTML characters?