No Sales, Item Description Issues, Technical Issues, Poor Customer Service

[whattheworldshop]

 I have been selling on ebay for 15+ years and have pretty consistant sales numbers.  Now I have really none and more listings which doesn't add up.  I have been getting complaints from customers about item descriptions.  I have found one of the issues is the item description is blank or random words are taken out of context and displayed as the item description which isn't the item description on mobile phones or apps.  the active content thing isn't supposed to take place until June but something is going on with it.  When I take a very plain listing with no active content though and view it on a mobile phone it still isn't right.  The test tool for previewing your listing to see if it is compatible doesn't do anything or it doesn't work.  I have called ebay several times this week wanting resolution or help and have been passed to the wrong person  to even rude people who don't care and even a person who told me no one is going to help me.  I am paying for listings which are not getting displayed how they are being entered and there apparently isn't anything I can do.  I have over 1500 listings that are all appearing like this.  This is all I do for a living and right now I am not making any money and they don't care at all.  I don't know what to do but something is seriously wrong.

[shipscript]

@whattheworldshop

The random text being pulled from your listing is the result of having a very long description without using eBay's mobile summary tags. eBay has been pulling random text for a couple of years now, and, because their bots can't tell what is description and what is conversation, they typically pull phrases that are used most frequently in the description. Most of mine had been showing terms text rather than description text.  Last Spring, eBay announced the mobile summary tags to solve that problem, and they have been operational since last September.

<div vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="Product">
<span property="description">
...selected description summary...plain text...
</span>
</div> 

The purpose of the HTML tags is to mark a paragraph of text that best describes the item. The text that appears between the tags should be plain unstyled text, with no other tags in there.

That specially marked paragraph will still appear in the description, but the added benefit is that ebay will also place it in an open graphics (o:g) ) meta tag to make your listing available to other shopping venues like google shopping, facebook, and mobile devices. It is also used as the summary that eBay will display in the mobile app on the first page of the listing.

As an example, I have created a test listing full of nonsense. But I did place one paragraph within eBay's Mobile Summary wrapper tags.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Mobile-Summary-test-/222476530853

When you look at that listing on a mobile device, you will see the intended paragraph appear on the first screen. If you were to view the HTML source of the above listing, you would see that eBay has also put that same paragraph in an o:g meta tag to share with other shopping aggregators.

As you can now see, if your description is lengthy, it is very important to make sure that eBay is spoon-fed the best representation of your product to spread to other services.

[vantagevintage]

I have been using this code since it was available and can't get it to work. My mobile summary descriptions are still randomly selected text. For some reason the code is being ignored. I use a simple table layout (I know this is not correct HTML) and the description code is within a cell. Could this be preventing the code from being recognized?