11-12-2018 04:44 PM
Has anyone else been getting this message while attempting to list items?
The length of the description has exceeded the maximum limit
Some of my descriptions are a bit wordy, but I've never encountered this before. Also, I can't find anywhere that tells me how many words I'm allowed. I think it must be another eBay glitch.
11-12-2018 05:03 PM
Speaking of writing listings, I strongly suggest that you read this:
https://pages.ebay.com/sell/itemdescription/mobilefriendlyguidelines.html
... and make your stuff IPR (immediate payment required) instead of trying to demand when people pay.
50-75% of shoppers use mobile devices and listings like yours do not display well.
11-12-2018 05:21 PM
@kcoburn586 wrote:
Some of my descriptions are a bit wordy, but I've never encountered this before. Also, I can't find anywhere that tells me how many words I'm allowed. I think it must be another eBay glitch.
I looked at about 7-8 listings of yours picked at random, and I don't see any descriptions that I would describe as "wordy" at all. My descriptions are typically 2-3 times as long as the ones of yours that I saw. When in your listing process does that message pop up?
If you're typing your descriptions elsewhere and then pasting them into the description field of the Selling form, I wonder if you're somehow bringing in a lot of hidden formatting code that's bloating the size of the text that you're showing. What's visible in your listings is nowhere near what I would call longwinded descriptions.
Try writing out your text in something neutral like a Windows Notepad window, so it's just plain text and nothing else, then paste that into the Selling form, and dress it up with font changes or color or whatever after it's in place, instead of before.
11-12-2018 05:26 PM
11-12-2018 05:27 PM
Wow I didn't even know this exists. So what's the limit?
11-12-2018 06:00 PM
@bigdeals.etc wrote:
Wow I didn't even know this exists. So what's the limit?
Whatever it is, I've never hit it, which should say something...
The reason I'm suggesting hidden formatting codes and such as the source of the problem is that I've seen seller descriptions here that just blather on for pages, and yet somehow the system doesn't choke when uploading all that glop.
In this case, the OP's descriptions that I've seen are pretty concise (i.e. shorter than this post), so if the error message is popping up when attempting to upload something similar for a new listing, then my thinking is that a ton of invisible coding is trying to come along for the ride.
11-12-2018 06:03 PM
or eBay has a new one ready to roll out on us.
11-12-2018 08:05 PM - edited 11-12-2018 08:06 PM
Yeah, making a listing mobile friendly is key. As ebay suggests - use bullet points.
Using bullet points forces one to focus on the key issues and leave out a bunch of "extra" text. This is advertising and being chatty and conversational often isn't the direction one wants to go. It can be a good exercise to create bullets points several times until it becomes old hat.
Remember the famous line? I'd write a shorter letter if I had more time"
Being concise and to the point does take some extra time, but once one gets the hang of it....
Good luck!
11-13-2018 12:20 AM
Your listings are chock full of MS Word (I assume) garbage.
I only checked one and it was pretty obvious. Item 192721963763 has 500kb of junk in the description.
9100+ lines (510,000+ characters) for just the description frame in a Firefox source viewer window (which is somewhat meaningless because it's actually a low number due to how HTML displays in source windows). Only about 50 of those lines are eBay code, and the actual viewable description in that listing is 3 simple lines of big green text.
eBay frame wrapper and HTML are lines 1-50 or so, your entire description is in lines 55-58 below, and 99% of the rest is junk:
The 9000 lines in between the two screenshots are just more of the same debris.
You need to clean them up, and I doubt that it can be done using the bulk editor, but I only see 85 listings. Easiest way would be to revise them one by one, copy the visible description text to the clipboard, flip over to the HTML tab and delete everything, flip back to the standard editing tab, paste the copied description text back in, and style the text with color, font, etc there. (You have a store template showing, but I don't know how editing a description affects that, if at all, as I don't have a store)
Alternatively if you have saved word document copies of the descriptions on your computer you could clean them up locally by saving them as plain text, and inserting that in the descriptions and styling as I described above, or use online word to HTML cleaners and then insert the cleaned HTML in the listings.
You really need to stop using word for this. Write the descriptions in plain text in notepad, copy that to the clipboard, create a listing, paste the clipboard text in the standard editor box, and color and fontificate it there in the eBay editor.
11-13-2018 01:54 AM - edited 11-13-2018 01:59 AM
@berserkerplanet wrote:Your listings are chock full of MS Word (I assume) garbage.
The 9000 lines in between the two screenshots are just more of the same debris.
(edited out pics here)
You need to clean them up, and I doubt that it can be done using the bulk editor, but I only see 85 listings. Easiest way would be to revise them one by one, copy the visible description text to the clipboard, flip over to the HTML tab and delete everything, flip back to the standard editing tab, paste the copied description text back in, and style the text with color, font, etc there. (You have a store template showing, but I don't know how editing a description affects that, if at all, as I don't have a store)
Alternatively if you have saved word document copies of the descriptions on your computer you could clean them up locally by saving them as plain text, and inserting that in the descriptions and styling as I described above, or use online word to HTML cleaners and then insert the cleaned HTML in the listings.
You really need to stop using word for this. Write the descriptions in plain text in notepad, copy that to the clipboard, create a listing, paste the clipboard text in the standard editor box, and color and fontificate it there in the eBay editor.
I did this. In the listing form for Editing your listing, I was having weird stuff come up... clicked on the HTML tab and it appeared that every single time I had edited the listings for anything... lines and lines of code were inserted.
Like hers where it has arrows and odd characters, it all means, "change to 12 font, color red, change to 24 font, change to 12 font, paragraph, return, return, repeat 50 times..."
That's the jist of what the HTML coding was doing. I had a couple listings where I couldn't even delete the coding, as it had no "line end" to it... it just went on and on for 20,000 characters... I just had to deleted the entire page to get it out of there.
took me a full week to edit all mine. I'm a computer nitwit, I just started deleting anything on the HTML screen -- anything that wasn't text, then highlighting all the crapola at the bottom (hundreds of lines!) and hit delete. Then back to the standard tab, and see what I had left. Fix color and font... then onto the next listing.
I didn't know that that was caused by MS Word... that would have been helpful! I'm careful now. I check the HTML tab regularly to make sure typing one sentence didn't add 100 lines of coding~!
11-16-2018 10:08 AM
Thanks so much everyone! I'm sure this is the problem. I save all the descriptions for my Christmas items in a Word doc for use from year to year. I guess this year all the junk caught up with me. Thanks again for your help. I will work with your suggestions and I'm sure I'll be successful.
Kathy
01-24-2019 04:45 AM
01-24-2019 05:45 AM - edited 01-24-2019 05:46 AM
@kcoburn586 wrote:Thanks so much everyone! I'm sure this is the problem. I save all the descriptions for my Christmas items in a Word doc for use from year to year. I guess this year all the junk caught up with me. Thanks again for your help. I will work with your suggestions and I'm sure I'll be successful.
1) Copy and paste your description into notepad (this will strip all the HTML nosense)
2) Copy and paste it from notepad into the eBay selling form
3) Adjust the appearance again in the eBay form
The above assumes you are in Windows. Notepad works great, or any other editor where you can copy and paste as "text only" will do.