What it was like to create an ebay listing in 2003

[brandonsvsu]

Here's a little blast from the past - I found archived away on my computer a few of the actual seller pages for setting up auctions on ebay in 2003.

[nobody*s_perfect]

Aww I remember those days of agonizing over how to use those precious 45 characters, whether to pay for an image, etc.

[southern*sweet*tea]

My favorite part was waiting 20 minutes to upload a picture on 19k dialup

[brandonsvsu]

The second image scaled really small for me so I broke it in half and re-posted below:

[faithandbutterflies]

Wow. I remember this & I had forgotten how we had to pay for extra photos. I enjoyed the themes though. I always paid for that. lol

[tev4all]

The good ole days. 

[marilyn6122]

WOW..the year I began eBay....Money was made, buyers were happy, returns were rare. We were masters of our own business....Oh for the good ol' days.

[slideshopper]

I so remember those days, especially with my copy of html for dummies. You had to put in html to even get a paragraph to show correctly.

[slideshopper]

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@marilyn6122 wrote:
WOW..the year I began eBay....Money was made, buyers were happy, returns were rare. We were masters of our own business....Oh for the good ol' days.

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And eBay was "only a venue" and had no control of the items sold. Quite a reversal these days

[r.c.p.b]

I remember paying for photos and listing before the mobile app.  Now I do so much on the app.

[castlemagicmemories]

A real blast from the past...fifteen years ago!

[mikeystoyz]

I remember when pictures were optional.

[cargo11]

Actually it drove me to learn HMLT and you off site hosting to upload more than one photo!  I could create beautiful templates and cut and paste instead of clicking back and forth the tabs to get a editor, and other specifics.  And yes, it took longer on dial up - but I got a computer upgrade so the loading and downloading became faster - people had 64m Macs and intro PCs back then - where did we store all those photos.....oh right - the items sold quick in auction and we did not have to relist them at all!!!

Ah the 95% sell thru rate.................yep, miss those days............now it's only 5%.

[18704d]

I had used my browser, Netscape, in a WYSIWIG mode to 'create' html.

(what you see is what you get)

You'd type in the words, change the colors of the text, or do paragraph breaks,

or center your words or pictures.

Then it'd convert it to HTML for you.

And I didn't pay for pictures.

I hosted them on my Comcast (Insight back then) server

and the html in my description would 'point' to it.

imgscr =    etc....

Lynn

[m60driver]

Like others, this is what motivated me to learn basic HTML and how to host pics and how to use an FTP program.  People forget that until recently, uploading to Ebay resulted in really second class pics.  I am still glad I have that basic html knowledge and still fire up my ancient html editor on occasion.