eBay shares a condensed description with other shopping networks.
If you don't tell eBay which text to use, their filters will try to make that determination without your help.
This tool will allow you to review all listings in one place to determine if you need to
use eBay's Mobile Summary tags for a better or more concise summary.
This scan is informational only.
The tool will scan items found publicly on eBay without accessing your account,
and can not search out-of-stock items or adult items, since those items are not publicly viewable.
The tool will attempt to locate and display eBay's mobile summary of your item description.
This tool can scan up to 10,000 items.
Use the search criteria to reduce the search range if you have more than 10,000
items, thus creating subgroupings based on category, price, or date order.
Alternatively, you can retrieve adult, out-of-stock, and more than 10K items
through eBay's File Exchange and can load that spreadsheet data into this tool
when choosing the File Exchange option from the country dropdown list.
This tool does not automatically edit your summary,
nor does it provide any way to directly edit eBay's extracted summary.
Instead, it will help you revise your item descriptions to provide
content that eBay can then correctly extract as a summary.
eBay will extract a new summary every time you edit the item description.
There are three ways to fix eBay's summary, and all three require adding Mobile Summary tags to the item description:
This tool will use the last method to help you revise and add a hidden block of text to your existing description. The provided code block will not display in your description, but will allow you to give eBay exactly the text you want for display in their "summary" locations. Alternatively, you can select a visible option.
Grid View: After completing a scan, the tool will list all of your items in a grid where you can view the Mobile Summary text that eBay has extracted for each listing. If you don't like eBay's selection, online editing is available as described later.
CSV Report: Want to review your summaries offline? After completing a scan, you will have the option to generate a CSV-formatted report of eBay summaries. You can copy and paste that report into a plain text file on your computer. To review your eBay summaries offline, open your saved report in a spreadsheet viewer. Alternatively, if you choose a tab-delimited format, the online report can be copied and pasted directly into an open spreadsheet without first saving to file.
eBay does not yet have a method that will allow sellers to edit the Mobile Summary text, but they do provide tags that will allow sellers to mark off the text eBay should use. This tool will extract eBay's summary text for you, and will provide several options for dealing with it.
Bulk Editing: Every summary has a checkbox so you can select those you want to revise. Each selected summary will be colorized and you will be able to edit directly in the grid (or use the popup EDIT button if that is more convenient). Thus, you can work through the entire online list to select (and edit if you wish) each bad summary. Editing the summary box does not alter your originals. Those selected summaries can then be output to a CSV spreadsheet that contains only the items you wish to revise. See "Revision File" below.
Editing one at a time:
Each item in the grid displays an EDIT button that will open the summary in a popup viewer for editing.
The editor will include eBay's summary tags wrapped around your summary.
The default coding will hide your summary so it won't disrupt your original description,
but eBay will still be able extract the summary for their purposes.
If you prefer a visible or bordered summary,
select the formatting option from the Revision Report
(which appears after the scan has finished)
before clicking the EDIT button.
After editing the summary text, copy the entire block of code.
Then click the REVISE button on the editor to open your eBay listing for revision.
(You must already be signed in to the correct account on eBay for revisions to work.)
Paste the entire copied block of code into the top of your description in HTML view.
Save your listing and close the window to return to the grid view where you can process the next change.
Revision File:
After editing selected summaries in the grid,
another option is to produce a report of those revised summaries.
The CSV-formatted report will gather up all the selected or revised summaries in one place
so you can work with the data offline at your convenience.
The report will allow you to include or exclude eBay's summary tags,
providing flexibility in how you use the data.
The mobile summary tags can be styled to show or hide the new summary,
using the provided droplist of selections.
If you wish to bulk revise your listings, use the option to include the description and the
tool will generate a File Exchange formatted file to replace your old description with your new one.
Be sure to select an option to add your mobile summary,
which will be prepended to the front of the description code.
Note that the revision file is produced onscreen in UTF-8 format, which is how eBay saves files.
However, eBay's US, CA, UK, AU, and DE File Exchange sites require an ISO-8859-1
character encoding format because that tool was originally based on Excel CSV output.
If your descriptions have no special characters, the files will be compatible,
but if special characters exist, they may not convert correctly if you upload directly
to File Exchange without first converting (and some characters may still be unconvertable).
Adding Descriptions: The description is retrieved from eBay when you select an item for revision in the grid. Thus, as more items are selected, more descriptions will be carried in your browser memory. You may see slower performance with many additions or with overly lengthy description templates, and may want to scan smaller subsets of items if many revision selections are expected.
Overlaps If scanning while listings are ending, relisting, or being added/removed, the results may have overlaps or gaps in data returned from eBay, as the tool will be retrieving from a moving target. The overlaps are captured here to adjust the totals, and you can ignore them. The gaps can only be captured by a subsequent scan at a later time.
Untested This tool will build a list of items to scan. All untested item rows will remain purple. Any that remain purple after the scan has completed have encountered a scan problem. If the scan stalls on a page, click the next page number to skip the problem and continue the scan.
Normal Items that successfully load a mobile summary are shown white.
Original Non-editing view of eBay's original mobile summary text.
OK Editable view. Click the option to switch from eBay's summary to editing your own summary. A summary that has fewer than 250 characters will display yellow. The best part of your summary should appear in the first 250 characters.
OK Editable view. Click the option to switch from eBay's summary to editing your own summary. A summary that has fewer than 800 characters will display orange. eBay allows summaries up to 800 characters for display on its own pages, but some venues will display only the first 250 characters.
Too Long Editable view. Click the option to switch from eBay's summary to editing your own summary. A summary that has more than 800 characters will display red. eBay will accept longer summaries from those who can't get an exact character count, but will truncate a long summary at the first word boundary below 800 characters.
