eBay

wastingtime101 · ‎08-25-2024

In response to this post and @stuff4divas tag on the ask a mentor forum:

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Ask-a-Mentor/Gobs-of-Garbage-HTML-in-Description-after-Mulitple-Edits-...

@siliconsam wrote:
Perhaps this has been covered. If so, sorry for the repeat. I seem to recall getting assistance in cleaning the HTML but of course eBay never updates their listing tool so it continues to be an issue.

Simply put: After multiple edits of the description of some, if not all listings, using normal text (not HTML directly) the HTML code becomes bloated with zillions of garbage strings along the lines of the following:

family:Arial">
<font style="font-

Dozens to hundreds of these garbage lines can appear if doing edits like going between bold and normal text.

These are just one example. The garbage could be variations on this general theme. Totally redundant code that doesn't do anything useful but takes up space until the size of the description portion of the listing exceeds some arbitrary limit and it will abort updating. Chopping off piles of these garbage lines eventually get's it back down to a size that is accepted, but the same thing will happen if it is edited again.

Is there any know remedy short copying out the HTML and processing it with a stand-alone cleanup tool? I have done that in the past so I am not looking for suggestions in that regard. It's just a PITA. ☹️

The short answer: there is no quick clean up fix within eBay's available tools.

The long answer: eBay discourages HTML because of mobile. Even basic tags (bold, italics, bullet points) will all hide a description on mobile behind a see more link. As a result, I've mostly stopped using any kind of HTML. I didn't use much in the past, but I am a fan of a bullet-pointed description in certain categories, and I have had occasions to add an occasional line of bold or italics text.

As for clean up, if you need to clean all of your listings, an external tool is going to make the quickest work of it. If it's just a handful of listings you can do a manual cleanse.

For a listing like 305447085268 the manual cleanse is easy. Copy the description. Click on HTML view and delete the description. Go back to regular view and SHIFT + Ctrl + V to paste the description without any formatting then add line breaks where needed.

There's a potential option with bulk edit, but I'm not even going to get into the find & replace tool since it'll only work if you're finding and replacing the exact same code on all of your listings. Not likely to be the case.

For a listing like 303503394501 you're clearly relying on a lot of HTML in terms of color, font, size, strength, etc. For a listing like that you'll need to do a manual cleanse on the HTML tab directly to avoid stripping and reformatting the entire thing - either that or use a third party tool.

How to prevent the problem in the future: As you discovered, any time you're messing with all the fonts, copy/pasting text, etc it creates a lot of extraneous HTML on the back end and I don't see eBay fixing that any time soon, if ever, since they discourage HTML.

If memory serves, any time you sell similar from a listing with a bunch of HTML, new tags are created at front and back. Sell similar 100 times and you've essentially got 200 extra tags. Not sure if the system is still doing that, but it was several years ago.

The way I always managed it when I used the occasional HTML in my listings: any time I edit a description with HTML, I do it directly on the HTML view. Because I know a decent amount of HTML coding that was never an issue for me. It avoids the system adding it's own extraneous tags.

I know that doesn't solve the problem, but it's the best I got for ya this evening.

GLORIOUS!