REMOVING "LINKS" from eBay listings!

[vintageista]

I learned something interesting that might be helpful in the REMOVING LINKS SAGA! I had been diligently removing links from a number of my listing only to have more appear, was pulling my hair out!  Come to find out, if you only remove the link from the "Standard" text, it still appears in the HTML text!  You have to access the HTML text in your descriptions and remove it from there! I also do a lot of relisting using existing listings as the basic of the new listing to save time (as eBay does not offer a good enought solution for this problem). But even though my new listing had no link, it was still present in the HTML portion of the listing, therefore a new violation!

All of these links were put there from "Wonderlister" which I had tried briefly as a substitute for Turbo Lister which eBay is doing away with, also since they have not given us a good alternative for Turbo Lister in several areas! Now, even though I decided that Wonderlister was not really a good alternative, I now have the UNPLEASANT & TIME CONSUMING TASK of having to remove each of these links, although they never benefitted me in anyway! WHAT A MESS THIS HAS ALL CREATED FOR SELLERS!

[castlemagicmemories]

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@vintageista wrote:

I learned something interesting that might be helpful in the REMOVING LINKS SAGA! I had been diligently removing links from a number of my listing only to have more appear, was pulling my hair out!  Come to find out, if you only remove the link from the "Standard" text, it still appears in the HTML text!  You have to access the HTML text in your descriptions and remove it from there! I also do a lot of relisting using existing listings as the basic of the new listing to save time (as eBay does not offer a good enought solution for this problem). But even though my new listing had no link, it was still present in the HTML portion of the listing, therefore a new violation!

All of these links were put there from "Wonderlister" which I had tried briefly as a substitute for Turbo Lister which eBay is doing away with, also since they have not given us a good alternative for Turbo Lister in several areas! Now, even though I decided that Wonderlister was not really a good alternative, I now have the UNPLEASANT & TIME CONSUMING TASK of having to remove each of these links, although they never benefitted me in anyway! WHAT A MESS THIS HAS ALL CREATED FOR SELLERS!

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Sorry, OP, for the extra work and trouble that you have to go to now.

There may be a way around this, but I can't recall what the tool is, if any.  Hopefully someone will show up that knows that.  I did an internet search and found something that seems terribly complicated and then I found your OP.  

[berserkerplanet]

You should be able to use the eBay BEAR (bulk editor in search and replace mode) if you can get a handle on the problem links/text.

Shipscript has details for lots of locate and some replace options here: https://community.ebay.com/t5/Replacing-Active-Content/How-to-find-and-cope-with-Active-Content-tuto...

Finally, I created a simple general search and replace tool (using Autohotkey) invoked by a keyboard hotkey combo that operates one at a time on individual eBay listing descriptions in the HTML tab.

(it pretty much also works anywhere else on your computer where text can be copied and pasted - in Microsoft Word, Yahoo Webmail, Turbolister, text editors, etc).

While it's running it remembers the last search and replace terms used, so once you figure out what to search for and what to replace, those entries would "stick" after the first use, and you could work your way through revising the offending listings one by one, and just hitting ALT-WIN-X while in the listing's HTML tab - it would replace all occurrences of the search string entered with your replace string (which might be just an empty string for your issue).

It is also RegEx capable (Regular Expressions) which makes it pretty powerful. If the links you need to search out are variable, hard to get a handle on, and impossible to characterize with a simple text search, a properly constructed RegEx search can latch on and get the job done. (the trick is constructing the RegEx search string - I and others can try to help with that as needed)

The raw script of the previous version itself, a basic demo video, along with links to the script and a ready to use Windows compiled version (that doesn't require Autohotkey framework installation) are here: http://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Here-we-go-again-quot-Changes-to-Chrome-will-affect-your/m-p/27...

Earlier this week I updated the above utility to:

• use already selected text blocks (if found) instead of just grabbing all text
• not deselect text on exit when no replacements were done. (helps when doing repeated runs to nail down a search string)

New v0.13 script:

http://berserkerplanet.altervista.org/code/scripts/ebay_listing_description_replace-o-matic_v0.13_09...

Stand alone compiled version (ready to run v0.13):

http://berserkerplanet.altervista.org/code/scripts/ebay_listing_description_replace-o-matic_v0.13_09...

[shipscript]

@vintageista

For sellers with a couple hundred listings to revise, eBay's BEAR tool will do the job as long as you know the link code that you want to remove. You can locate that color-coded link code on the "Markup" tab on the Sandbox tool.

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

Additionally, the Sandbox tool automatically strips the bad codes for you and provides you with repaired code to replace in your item description when you revise your listing.  The repaired code can be found on the "Filtered" tab.

To do the same thing in bulk, the Active Content Editor tool, paired with eBay's File Exchange, will automatically repair and allow you to then update thousands of listings in one pass.

http://www.isdntek.com/ebaytools/ActiveContent_support/BulkEditorInstructions.htm

[carpartguru]

The eBay File Exchange page is not loading , is anyone having same problem?