eBay Fall Seller Update

eBay reiterated in the Fall Seller update; all listings on eBay need to comply with the active content changes. If you’re selling on eBay and you’re using any kind of listing template, this is something that you really need to pay attention to.

We’ve mentioned the specific details of the changes in a previous blog here. As eBay certified developers, all our eBay store and listing designs are active content compliant.

The eBay stores and listings we design are completely mobile responsive and feature no JavaScript or other elements of active content.

If you’re currently using a listing template on eBay or are looking at having one designed, we can produce an eBay active content compliant listing design for your store.

Bulk Listings

Once we’ve completed a listing design for you store, revising every listing can seem a daunting task. It takes roughly 3 minutes to revise a listing with a new listing template. Let’s say you have 500 listings; you’d be looking at:

3 x 500 / 60 = 25 hours to update every listing.

That works out at just over 3 full 8 hour days with no breaks. Realistically you’re looking at a whole working week, and that’s just for 500. If you’re selling more items, you could be looking at a long , slow slog of updating products while more important aspects of looking after your business go neglected.

With our bulk edit tool, we can revise all of your existing listings with the new template. This includes listings that have a template already attached and listings that have no styling or listing. The cost for a bulk edit varies depending on the amount of listings on your store so get in touch and see what we can do to help boost your sales today.

If you're with BT, you might not be reading this.

For the second day running, a fault at  Telehouse North, an exchange in London's Docklands is causing issues with many BT customers broadband service. There are plenty of online sources attempting to get to the bottom of what's causing the issue and how many people it's affecting. BT are saying this outage has affected "less than 5 percent" of their customers, however when your customer base runs into the tens of millions, that's not a very small number.

This all started just a day after MPs told BT OpenReach to put it's house in order. A failure on this level highlights a lack of any kind of redundancy. The fact that there's no redundancy in place in 2016, a time when so many businesses and services rely on a constant internet service is absolutely stunning.

If you have been struggling to get online (and are a bit tech savvy) there are ways of getting online using your BT broadband to swap your DNS settings to a different ISP. If you prefer a more low tech approach ask if any of your neighbours using a different ISP if you can piggyback their internet until BT get their house in order. There are plenty of ways and means of getting back online while BT sorts it's issues out.

Changes to eBay template rules.

Recently ebay released the “Spring Seller Update 2016” announcing significant changes to what they require within listing template. This involves removing “Active content” which includes JavaScript, form actions and flash.  It also requires listings to be mobile friendly.

These are significant but positive changes, if you’re wondering why? Well...

1. They’ll help search rankings. With changes to Google’s Algorithms in 2015, sites that load slowly or aren’t mobile responsive took a huge hit in search rankings. This effected eBay listings in Google searches dramatically.

2. It’ll improve the customer experience. Given over half of internet traffic is on a mobile device, it’s more likely the consumer viewing your listing is using a smart phone. If the listingis slow, the consumer is going to be less likely to wait around for it to load and even less likely to buy from it. The same is true if the text is tiny, a common occurrence on smaller screens when pages aren’t properly formatted for mobile browsing.

Flash, Javascript and Forms Actions are what eBay are concentrating on here because they load slowly on mobile devices, it’s worth noting that Flash isn’t supported on Chrome and  iOS phones at all. On a mobile network these elements will dramatically slow down a listings load time so eBay are doing away with them.  eBay have stated“The use of active content in listings, including JavaScript, Flash and form actions can inhibit purchases on mobile devices and can lead to abuse in the marketplace. From spring 2017, we’ll limit the use of active content in all new listings across all devices and it will not appear by default. Later in 2017, we plan to remove or block listings with active content. We encourage you to limit your use of active content now“.

The security aspect is probably the most important. Sellers have, in the past, used tools to add in functionality to their listings that eBay didn’t support. Unfortunately scammers use similar code for malicious purposes.

eBay have suggested removing active content now because in 12-24 months, listings with active content will have the active content blocked or the whole listing removed. You’ve got plenty of notice. If your listings contain active content; now’s the time to get started making changes.

So what can I do?

If you’re using any kind of listing template, chances are it’s using JavaScript. You can check it by copying item number into this checker to see what needs changing.

If you only use plain text in your listings, they may still considered not mobile friendly for a variety of reasons. Either way, right now, 2017 is months away and there’s plenty of time. Check your listings for active content and mobile compatibility. If you’re at all unsure about the implications of these changes to your listings; speak to a professional. Make sure your listings are compliant to the new rules before they come into effect.

Hotlinking - What is it and why you shouldn't be doing it.

I was speaking with an eBay seller recently, he mentioned he'd been working on his own eBay listings template for a few months (!) and was very proud of it. He asked me to have a look. Right off the bat it was not a good design, it was a basic template, white background peppered with images hotlinked from other sites. One was of the item on sale, hotlinked from the manufacturer. Most were clip art like a delivery truck and a large animated exclamation mark. All hotlinked from other sites without permission.

What is hotlinking?

Hotlinking is directly linking to another websites files without permission. For example lets say you wanted to use an image of a spaceship on your page or listing. You find the exact right image you want on www.notmysite.com. Hotlinking the image would look like this:  <IMG SRC="http://wwww.notmysite.com/images/spaceship.jpg height="400" width="250">.  This means the server of notmysite.com will be using up additional bandwith to display the hotlinked image on your page. A simple analogy for this would be if a stranger came into your office and started charging their mobile phone from your plug sockets without asking. It's quite rude and costing you money.
Why should I stop hotlinking? It means more work.

If you happen to be hotlinking it's important to stop for 2 reasons.

1. You're using bandwidth paid for by the person whos image your using. Although not illegal, it’s really damned cheeky.

2. If the person you're hotlinking the image from notices (and that's very easy to do with services like copyscape) they can hit you with the switcheroo. An example this would be when The Huffington Post hotlinked an entire comic from Matt Inman, also known as The Oatmeal. Inman replaced all the hotlinked images with copies of his web hosting bill, to show how much this extra traffic from the hotlinking was costing him.

Here at Jarilo I've seen a hotlinked image of a childrens school bag be switched out for an image of a naked woman. Embarassing for the ebay seller and it could've easily led to his ebay store being taken down. I contacted the seller to advise them, they weren’t pleased when they found out.
How can I get images on my site or template without hotlinking?
Glad you asked. Firstly you can host them yourself, if you've a hosting package you can upload an image, grab the link and have it live instantly. This gives you a quicker load time and cause zero problems. If you want an easy, quick solution to image hosting without a hosting package we recommend photobucket for it's easy interface and cost (free). Check it out.

Going back to the client who showed me the listing template, I had to explain to him upfront that he couldn’t continue to hotlink images from other sites. Once he understood that, we were able to put together a beautiful design for his store. If you’re looking for a way to put images on your website or listing pages, there are many different, legitimate ways to go about it, hotlinking certainly isn’t one of them.

The importance of having a mobile-friendly website.

According to an announcement on its Webmaster's central blog, Google said:

"Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices".

Some seem a little confused about the impact of this statement. We wanted to let you know a few important pointers to make things a little easier to understand without the 'techy talk'. 

In a nutshell, Google are now penalising websites that aren't easy to read on a mobile device. This means that if your website is not mobile-friendly it will not be ranked high on google rankings.

Why are Google Rankings so important? 

Google ranks your website on compatibilty with other devices, readability and functionalities. It is all about being easy for the customer to view and navigate round. If your website does not appear to be mobile-friendly this is seen as something that can push you down on the Google rankings. For a business to well, get business one of the main techniques is to be Search Engine Optimised. If it isn't and doesn't compete well with its other competitors on the world wide web, it will not be seen and drop right back when searched on Google.

If you have no clue if your website is 'mobile-friendly' the developers at Google have created this cool little tool to allow you to analyse your website. All you need to do is pop your web URL in here.

We have a lot of existing customers we are upgrading to make sure they are mobile-friendly. They realise the importance of this and you guys should too.

If you're worried that your website isn't displaying right on your mobile device, we will help you out no problem. Within a week, this news has taken the world by storm, and here at Jarilo we believe this is a vital move.

If you would like any information about taking the big step to an optimised website, contact us at gemmamacey@jarilo.co.uk or give us a call on 0151 601 4695 and we can talk you through the benefits further.

Step into the revolution and take the leap now!

Starting your own business!

Within our industry we connect with many clients who are looking at starting their own business, but that's as far as it goes. They know they want to market it but how? and what else do they need to know? 


The top 5 fundamentals every business start-up should be doing:

1. Research your market - identify potential customers. Talk to them and find out if your idea is meeting a real need.
   
2. Develop and plan - test your product or service with real customers, make changes, and test it again. Keep doing this until you’re sure there’s a demand for it.
   
3. Find partners and suppliers - think about who you’re going to work with to develop and sell your idea.
   
4. Set up your business - work out which legal structure is right for you, and register for tax.
   
5. Get funding - explore different sources of business finance, from bank loans to government-backed schemes.
    (https://www.gov.uk/starting-up-a-business/start-with-an-idea)
   
   Without these fundamentals you don't have any foundations to work on. Once all is set in place, we come into play.
   Branding is incredibly important when you're a new business as you don't have any real clientele to 'blow your trumpet' about the services you offer, and the quality of services. You need to make yourself known. This could be through doing a range of things:
   
   
   
   • Introducing yourselves to local business/ local communities through direct mail
      
   • Using the power of digital to market yourself, whether this be with social media, an online selling platform like eBay/ Etsy/ Amazon, or to build an eCommerce website and rely on SEO and Google PPC to carry you up the rankings 
   • Having a strong presence in the market. What is your product in demand, how are you going to push past your competitors and generate leads?    
     
     
   We offer array of services required to help you make them first steps into the business world. 
   
   Anything from an eBay custom store design to help you push branding and increase sales to a fully all singing all dance eCommerce website where you can sell your products and we can advise you on your SEO effectiveness. 
   
   Here are a few examples of our previous work. 
   
   

   

   Facebook profile picture with logo design

   
   

   
   

   
   

   

   Raptor Sports eCommerce Website

   

   Rustic Dish eBay store design

   As you can see our designs are very bespoke and custom built. We take great pride in our quality of work and our competitive pricing. Now with over 2000 clients, we can say we are proud to be helping so many business's.
   
   For a eBay store design prices are from £189.99. 
   For a logo design prices are from £80.00.
   For a eCommerce website (built on either Opencart or Woocommerce) prices from £450.00.
   We offer many other services including listing templates, information sites, Wordpress plug in's, eBay simple listings software and offline marketing collateral.
   
   If you have any enquiries at all please email: gemmamacey@jarilo.co.uk or call us on 0151 601 4695.
   
   
   
   Written by Gemma Macey
   Sales and Marketing Assistant
   www.jarilo.co.uk
   

April's eBay store designs.

So, we are coming close to May and we thought we would take this opportunity to showcase some of our best pieces of work from this month.

We have a new apprentice on board with the eBay designer team which is doing fantasically well.
We would love your feedback on our design work and for you to let us know which ones you like best by commenting below!

To make it fair we won't tell you which designer designed which store, vote below! :)

 

Chilli Wizards
http://stores.ebay.co.uk/chilliwizards/

Premier Watches UK
http://jarilo.co.uk/ebaystores2015/premierwatches/testingcustom.html

Vault 101
http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Vault-101-Limited

What do you think is the best design?

Chilli Wizards

Premier Watches UK

Vault 101

Poll Maker