eBay

vintagetoyrama · ‎05-13-2018

Recently when I list an item and type out the description and submit when I go back into the active listing there is nothing in the description. Does anyone know why this is happening and know what I need to do? Thanks appreciate any help

Anonymous · ‎05-13-2018

I do not see your descriptions in FireFox. I do see them in Safari.

berserkerplanet · ‎05-13-2018

You are running into an issue I warned about last year. eBay (stupidly) wraps the description in another

<font size="4" style="font-family:Arial" rwr="1"> ..</font>

tag pair every time you edit it or relist it.

It is imperative that sellers clean this mess up periodically (I do it every time I edit) or you will run into this issue with browsers chocking on the depth of tag nesting that results.

You have something like 74 levels deep of these tags nested at this point. Your description just disappears in Firefox 31 browser (different browsers and browser versions have different tolerances for this baked in by the developers - it's a tradeoff they make that pits resistance to this issue against memory and resource usage by the browser)

<table align="center" style="border-spacing: 0px; width: 100%;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<div id="ds_div">
<font size="4" style="font-family:Arial" rwr="1">
<font size="4" style="font-family:Arial" rwr="1">
<font size="4" style="font-family:Arial" rwr="1">
<font size="4" style="font-family:Arial" rwr="1">
<font size="4" style="font-family:Arial" rwr="1">
<font size="4" style="font-family:Arial" rwr="1">
<font size="4" style="font-family:Arial" rwr="1">
<font size="4" style="font-family:Arial" rwr="1">
<font size="4" style="font-family:Arial" rwr="1">
<font size="4" style="font-family:Arial" rwr="1">
<font size="4" style="font-family:Arial" rwr="1">
<font size="4" style="font-family:Arial" rwr="1">
<font size="4" style="font-family:Arial" rwr="1">
....

Revise your listing. Switch to the HTML tab. Select all the leading <font size="4" .... tags at the beginning and delete them. You also need to delete the trailing </font> close tags at the end.

Then you should be able to see the description after saving those changes.

You will probably need to clean up any other listings also as it appears they are either old and have relisted a lot, or you are editing them a lot (remember, a new tag pair is added for every revise or relist).

Unfortunately there is no surefire automated tool to do this/do it in bulk. Shipscript and I discussed it a little bit, and it turned out to be too messy to try to account for all the possibilities/permutations trying to use a RegEx (regular expression) approach, but according to shipscript, the ISDNTek Bulk Active Content Editor has a provision for that (unfortunately requires use of eBay FileExchange which has a learning curve), and the ISDNTek Sandbox tool also has some capability.

(see shipscript's post 14 in the thread linked below)

See this thread for more info on the nested tag issue:

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Firefox-fails/m-p/27703682/highlight/true#M1080529

Out of curiosity, what browser (and browser version) are you using that doesn't display the description?

Anonymous · ‎05-13-2018

@penguins_dont_fly wrote:
The text is all run together ... it looks like you are just typing into the HTML tab? Make sure you are in the "Rich Text" tab when entering the description.

That appears to be how OP typed it- no spaces or punctuation in many areas. The html tab would still recognize basic spaces and punctuation if they were used.

The problem appears to be with the number of font tags on the listing. There were more than 20,000 characters of font tags- so many I couldn't even include them in this post. That needs to be edited out.

							<font rwr='1' size='4' style='font-family:Arial'>
&nbsp;Up for Auction Gold tone Rhinestone Penquin Brooch Pinapprox 2"Combined shipping 50% off each additional shipping and handling chargeafter the first purchaseVisit my store Vintage Heaven and more for more great deals

</font>

vintagetoyrama · ‎05-13-2018

Thanks everyone sounds like I need to clean up, I have used many times list similiar off another listing which is probably what caused this. I will try it fresh and go from there. Thanks again

castlemagicmemories · ‎05-13-2018

@penguins_dont_fly wrote:
@dugoldstuff wrote:
I saw that issue on a few of my listings too. I found a little tab that says "Item Description" that you have to click on to see the description!
If you are getting the "see description" button, it means that you have some "mixed content" element in your listing.

Edit the listing and run the "Mobile Friendly" checker (there's a link above the description in the SYI form) ... it will tell you what needs to be fixed. Check all 3 tabs of the checker, look at them all and either use the "fix it" button, or edit the HTML/links manually.

Yes, please do this as it will be much better for you and for your buyers to be able to see the whole description and not have to click on the see description bar.

Some won't do that and that could cause problems, either by buying without really knowing what they are buying or by them just hitting the back button.

dhbookds · ‎05-13-2018

@castlemagicmemories

Castle, while she may need to make these mobile friendly, AFTER she corrects them, that's not the problem in not being able to see the descriptions on a pc...

castlemagicmemories · ‎05-13-2018

@dhbookds wrote:
@castlemagicmemories

Castle, while she may need to make these mobile friendly, AFTER she corrects them, that's not the problem in not being able to see the descriptions on a pc...

@dhbookds

Oh, ok, I thought it was the same HTML issue? Am I ocnflating the two issues? Please explain, thank you.

berserkerplanet · ‎05-13-2018

The <font rwr='1' size='4' style=.... tags are to force an eBay chosen, standardized font for mobile, but the issue at hand here isn't mobile.

The problem is that eBay just jams a new set of font tags into every listing description every time it is revised. relisted, or a sell similar is done. Browsers, particularly Firefox, were not designed to handle tag nesting when it gets super deep, as it costs memory and browser resources to accommodate buffering those structures, so developers make compromise choices.

Turns out that enough tags are piling up in some listings over time here on eBay to break Firefox. I did some testing 6 months ago, and the limit depended on the browser and the tag type, but in this thread, about 75 levels deep of font tags was enough to break FF31.

The browser doesn't crash, it just quits drilling down in the nested mess and doesn't display the content in that nest - in this case the seller's description (or as my testing showed - part of the description until it runs of of allocated resources.
(if a few levels of nested font tags were removed from OP's listing, parts of the description would start to appear, as more levels were removed, more of the description would display)

The fix is for sellers to do housekeeping on their listing descriptions. I delete the tags by habit when I revise/edit a listing (because I edit all my listings manually in the HTML tab anyway), and for the ones I just relist month after month, it will take probably more than 6 years (12 added tag sets per year) before it is a problem so I don't worry about it (if something doesn't sell in 6 years, well...)

It is a stupid problem and eBay failed big time. They could easily fix it by not adding tags if they already added them, but instead, they change the layout and sometimes location of the tags making it difficult if not impossible for sellers to remove them with bulk editing tools. (Theoretically possible to maybe bulk remove some of them using File Exchange with shipscript's bulk active content editor if the tags are in standard positions and format.)