ShipScript has been an eBay Community volunteer since 2003, specializing in HTML, CSS, Scripts, Photos, Active Content, Technical Solutions, and online Seller Tools.
I just updated some listing descriptions through File Exchange and noticed the FE logo and footer were not added (thank you)! No-logo was the norm on the UK site for some some time. When did this come into effect on the US site, and is it now standard across all FE sites?
I only deal with revisions. Does this omission also apply to new listings created through File Exchange?
@dollybeauty What are you seeing on new listings?
Well, I spoke too soon. I tried a few more tests on a different account with a single listing using various metadata in each test and the logo was applied in all cases. One untested difference in my initial batch is that one item already had a logo and the other five in that revision did not, and those other five had none applied. So more testing is in order to figure out what caused the difference.
Thank you for your response. I'm sending this one to the X-files. The logos have now appeared on the original job as well. 
When I first ran that job, I was planning to go back through and remove the logos. When I checked, the logos were not there, so I assumed the files had not yet updated and went into the eBay source code to check. But when I viewed the source codes of several, my new code was added and the logo was not.
I have no explanation. I'm probably just running on empty today with too many fires to put out 
. I apologize for the flurry and thank you for your continued support.
BUT, I do have one more question. Last summer, my download of the "price and quantity" template contained ISO-8859-1 metadata:
Action(SiteID=US|Country=US|Currency=USD|Version=585|CC=ISO-8859-1)
From my october download onward, that header is now:
Action(SiteID=US|Country=US|Currency=USD|Version=585|CC=UTF-8)
Since we've already confirmed that the US site does not support UTF-8, and testing today reconfirms that status, should the download template be displaying the UTF-8 option as if it were valid? Thanks as always.
wrote:
Thank you for your response. I'm sending this one to the X-files. The logos have now appeared on the original job as well.
When I first ran that job, I was planning to go back through and remove the logos. When I checked, the logos were not there, so I assumed the files had not yet updated and went into the eBay source code to check. But when I viewed the source codes of several, my new code was added and the logo was not.
I have no explanation. I'm probably just running on empty today with too many fires to put out
BUT, I do have one more question. Last summer, my download of the "price and quantity" template contained ISO-8859-1 metadata:
Action(SiteID=US|Country=US|Currency=USD|Version=585|CC=ISO-8859-1)
From my october download onward, that header is now:
Action(SiteID=US|Country=US|Currency=USD|Version=585|CC=UTF-8)
Since we've already confirmed that the US site does not support UTF-8, and testing today reconfirms that status, should the download template be displaying the UTF-8 option as if it were valid? Thanks as always.
@shipscript - No worries at all. I appreciate you taking the time to bring this to my attention.
As for the download metadata, it does appear our system has changed the character coding values. More and more File Exchanges users are needing help with retrain special characters in their CSV file. Adjusting our file to utilize UTF-8 should help with encoding Unicode characters.
If no special character is present in the file, our system will accept metadata without "CC" details. Action metadata can be used as: Action(SiteID=US|Country=US|Currency=USD|Version=941
If you have more questions regarding this, please feel free to respond to this post. I'll be happy to get more details from our developers regarding this change.
Sincerely,
mykal@ebay
eBay Support
Job#889512715
The job contains UTF-8 data uploaded with this metadata:
Action(SiteID=US|Country=US|Currency=USD|Version=941|CC=UTF-8)
results: https://www.ebay.com/itm/222821907642
As an aside: I should point out for those following this conversation that I uploaded two prior jobs today ( #889508835,#889512035) with various changes to the metadata, but there was no change registered on the listing because the actual description had not changed. Just a little monkeywrench in the testing scenarios. I had to actually add a word to the description for FE to post the revision, as shown in the listing's revision history today.
And this is the same test performed last april with the same conversion results.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/382036124098
As you can see from the results, the content does not convert correctly.
für „Artikel
displays, in both job results, as
für „Artikel
This is the source doc manually uploaded through SYI last year, which is fine:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/222467669781
The only way I can get those umlauts, eszetts (Grüße), and diacriticals to correctly display through FE is to ask my server to convert eBay's raw UTF-8 data to ISO-8859-1 (my server uses CP1252 with Transliteration for best match) . Then I can upload to FE as ISO-8859-1 (CP1252). The job never touches a spreadsheet like Excel, so the problem is not being introduced by a desktop tool. I've gone through this exercise with the FE team a few times in the past year with always the same result. The team "thinks" the US tool supports UTF-8, but internal experimentation then shows them it does not. I believe this issue affects all the English sites (US,UK,AU,CA). Anyway, that is what brought me to question the display of "UTF-8" in the download template, since it really is not supported here.
I wish it were supported, since eBay now stores descriptions as UTF-8 by default. Listings created on the site are UTF-8. And I think the uploads from File Exchange get converted to UTF-8 for site storage because if I upload an ISO version, it will come back from eBay as UTF-8. However, if I upload UTF-8 to FE, I think the storage mechanism again applies a conversion to UTF-8 that clobbers the code. In my testing last year, I believe I found that uploading a UTF-8 file with and without the UTF-8 metadata corrupted the files differently. I'll have to verify because it was so long ago, but I think that could point to the root of the problem.
I truly appreciate your effort. I have had this conversation with the FE team 6 months ago when the limitation was acknowledged by staff, and I was asked if I thought there was increased demand for UTF-8 that would support further development. I really could not answer that, but I know my tools and forums posts continue to introduce sellers to File Exchange, so there is a little more awareness out there.
I suspect the problem in making the US File Exchange compatible with UTF-8 is fraught with problems. The spreadsheet programs we use in this country are still producing ISO content, so the default should probably remain ISO. But for those who know the difference and want to upload UTF-8, I believe the UTF-8 option should be implemented.
If it is too much effort to implement that action, then the FE docs should spell out the limitations that exist on the English speaking sites (I think I was told that Germany has the same limitation, but I don't recall specifically). Currently the docs do not discuss any such limitation, and that is misleading.
