Cleaning up eBay-Generated HTML Garbage in Listings

[siliconsam]

Hi:

Using the default eBay listing tool, HTML for the listing description is generated automatically from the plain text.  After awhile, this ends up with literally hundreds or thousands of redundant coding blocks like <font></font>.  On a fair size listing the description eventually exceeds the allowable limit due to this garbage and it cannot then be saved.  Further, attempting to repair it ends up being futile and the only solution is to cancel the edit and start over.

I have been able to clean up the eBay-generated HTML by copying the description from the listing into MSWord and then exporting as HTML.  While this messes up some aspects of the formatting slightly, that can be relatively easily repaired.  The size goes down by a huge huge amount.  And until the eBay listing tool gets its hands on the code, it looks relatively ordinary.

Is there any better way to do this?  There should be a button labeled "Cleanup HTML".  Or (gasp) it should generate proper code in the first place!  One would think that after decades of essentially the same issue, it would have been solved.

Thanks,

--- sam

[shipscript · Accepted solution]

Excessive HTML tag nesting can actually cause the description to disappear in browsers that do not support nesting more than 160 to 180 elements deep.

This tool has a filter to remove excessive eBay font tags, in bulk, producing a CVS file of revised descriptions that can be uploaded back to eBay's File Exchange. File Exchange has been folded into eBay's "Seller Hub > Reports > Uploads".

https://www.isdntek.com/ebaytools/ActiveContentEditor.htm

1. Enter username and country.
2. Click "Get eBay Items".
3. Items will load and the Scan setting screen will appear.
4. Uncheckmark any unwanted filters.
5. Checkmark "* Font tags (eBay)".
6. Click "Start new scan".
7. When the scan completes, scroll down and open "Description Spreadsheets for File Exchange".
8. Click "Generate Zip files - Revised File Exchange CSV (std)".
9. When the report is generated, download to your desktop and open the zip file.
10. Extract and upload the unzipped CSV File Exchange report to Seller Hub.  

That seems like a lot of steps, but it's not really that much after you've done it once.

However, the bulk tool only strips the outer tags. I looked at one of your listings (303503811324) with 44,000 characters and has inner groupings of eBay font tags, so stripping won't reduce it that much (sigh). 

Sooo... there is another tool for one-at-a-time editing that will remove all but the most basic tags (and font is not a basic tag), which would get you down under 2,000 characters where it belongs, but might affect some of the formatting that is not basic.

https://www.isdntek.com/ebaytools/MobileSummaryEditor.htm

1. Enter an item number and country. 
2. Click "Load Item".
3. Click the option below the text box that has three leaves (least amount of code stripping).
4. Manually copy and paste the results from the code box or standard box into the appropriate editing tab on eBay.

This may not be much different than using your Word method.

[siliconsam]

Thanks for the quick reply.  The second method looks promising.  I tried it with another listing that had much more garbage and it seemed to do exactly what was needed, even easier than using MSWord. 😉  I think I used the right-hand button (with no leaves) that converted the original HTML text to a normal eBay description with all the required formatting, and then copied and pasted that into the description block as "Standard" (not HTML).

You'd think that a code cleaner like this would be run automagically during or after listing creation or editing.  If nothing else, it would cut eBay's storage costs. 😉

Cheers,

--- sam

[shipscript]

@siliconsam 

It really would be helpful if eBay offered a cleanup tool. As it is, since the font tags are valid, but just superfluous, I'm not sure that standard tag correction tools would work, and eBay would have to design a special filter just to remove their extraneous tags.

I have not checked the tag problem on eBay's new unified listing tool to see if they have solved the font-tag nesting problem on that tool. You may want to create a listing with that tool and then edit it a few times to see if the wrapping appears. The new Unified Lister will drop some of the more complex code from premade seller templates, but that would not seem to affect the low-end styling you are adding.

A really severe option would be to copy the formatted text from eBay's standard tab into eBay's HTML tab. That will strip off all codes. Then when you return to the standard tab, you would have to reformat everything.

I also looked at a different filter on the first bulk tool I linked. There is one to remove ALL font tags instead of selecting only eBay font tags. That left all the formatting in place but did strip all the colors and the Arial font style from the listing.  That bulk tool has a sister tool that processes a single listing at a time:

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

1. Enter your item number in the top box of the Sandbox tool.
2. Open "Custom" or "More" (over on the right) and checkmark the "Font tags (all)" option.
3. Click "SCAN". 
4. Scroll down and open the "Filtered" tab and checkmark the "Custom" option in its title bar.
5. The new code will appear and you will notice on the Filtered tab that there is a link at the lower left to open your eBay listing for revision if you wish.
6. Copy the filtered HTML and paste into the HTML of your eBay description.
7. Return to eBay's standard tab, add any style changes, and save. 

You can repeat with other item numbers and the checkmarked options will remain while the tool is open, so less clicking.

So now you have a selection of  tools that could help. Hopefully one of them will work best for you.

[siliconsam]

The bottom line seems to be that indeed there are several eBay and non-eBay tools that can be used to strip the extraneous garbage, but eBay should make it easier than pulling teeth to find them. 😉  It would be in everyone's interest to clean up the HTML automatically when a listing is created or edited, or at least provide a button to do this on the listing editing page.

Thanks, everyone. 😉

--- sam