eBay

theobtainery · ‎07-07-2019

I've been attempting to solve this issue for weeks now. I've followed the instructions mentioned in multiple discussion boards and YouTube videos including:

1.) Clicking the mobile-friendly checker. Which always states: "Great Job! Your Listing Is Ready To Go. No Horizontal Scrolling" But upon checking my listing description on mobile you still have to scroll horizontally.

2.) Adding the <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> to the HTML Portion of my eBay description. I've done this many different ways, to the beginning, to the end, I've pasted the line into a text editor to have the font changed to the type of font that is defaulted in the HTML description.

3.) I've removed all potentially non-mobile friendly features from my description including Underlines, italics, active content, multiple different fonts, etc... My description only consists of 14pt Arial Bold.

I'm not sure what else I could possibly do to make it mobile friendly. All of the aforementioned were tips that I implemented from multiple YouTube videos and discussion boards that haven't worked. I know that making my listings mobile friendly isn't necessarily going to skyrocket my sales, but I would still like to optimize my store to be as consumer-friendly as possible. I would greatly appreciate the help of the community to get this issue fixed. I will include any screenshots I assume could be helpful. Thanks!

packratville · ‎07-07-2019

I think the coding from some of your old fonts is still in there based on the screen shot, along with a lot of other coding that I don't think is necessary. There's reference to asian fonts, stretched fonts, etc.

What I found in my old listings is that they carried a lot of old baggage, so to speak, from the original listing and subsequent revisions and the coding was really messed up. I ended up copying the text in a text editor that stripped out all the formatting, then copied that text back in to my listing and reformatted it. I don't know about the mobile friendly aspect (the checker said everything was okay), but it really cleaned up the coding.

I'd suggest trying that with one of your listings to see how it goes.

Also, eBay announced on June 26 that listings are automatically made mobile friendly so you don't need to add that viewport code any more (and they said it wasn't necessary to remove it either).

gamersbaystore · ‎07-07-2019

Generally speaking, any textual content/photos, or general formatting you add to a page isn't going to affect your page's code or make it not mobile friendly. I was a web developer for years, and I can tell you from experience that its up to ebay's developers to make this site mobile friendly.

If it isn't mobile friendly, then its the developers fault, and there is nothing you can do to change a given page's underlying code. Go and view the page's code, you cannot change it because its read only. Viewport is page specific and applies to the entire page. Placing it in the middle of the page in the midst of a bunch of HTML tags has zero affect, browsers will just ignore it.

The only code you have access to in a listing is the formatting for the description box, which does not change the formatting for the entire page, that's not how it works.

Yes, active content like Flash is not mobile friendly, but ebay doesn't allow active content like this anyway, and they will block it anyway.

orangehound · ‎07-07-2019

@gamersbaystore wrote:
Generally speaking, any textual content/photos, or general formatting you add to a page isn't going to affect your page's code or make it not mobile friendly. I was a web developer for years, and I can tell you from experience that its up to ebay's developers to make this site mobile friendly.

If it isn't mobile friendly, then its the developers fault, and there is nothing you can do to change a given page's underlying code.

^^ This is my experience as well ... when our listing gets deployed, it will have a lot of CSS added by eBay. You can put in certain code, and it will work well in the preview, but once deployed it seems that eBay takes over and displays it however they wish.

wastingtime101 · ‎07-07-2019

Your issue is not just with mobile view, it's also with desktop view. I looked at your dwarf listing and the code shows a fixed width. This is causing the horizontal scrolling issue.

width: 1349px

Do what packrat suggested and paste your info to a text editor like notepad. Go to the edit format options and make PLAIN TEXT. Once that's done, revise the eBay listing and click on the HTML tab. Delete the entire contents. Paste the plain text. Switch back to the rich text tab to enter your line breaks and formatting. It's the cleanest way to correct the problem and get rid of all the extra coding.

GLORIOUS!

theobtainery · ‎07-07-2019

Thank you very much! The issue was fixed after following these instructions. Now to edit nearly 200 listings. Haha, thanks again.

theobtainery · ‎07-07-2019

Thank you! This finally helped me fix the issue.

wastingtime101 · ‎07-07-2019

Don't forget if you relist any unsold listings to clean the formatting as you go. 200 listings shouldn't be too bad to manage. Set a goal like 10-20 per day and you'll have them all fixed in a couple of weeks.

GLORIOUS!