GarageSale - Item Description Summary - Shows GS Version Number + Same Random Text

I am working on a new eBay template.

I am testing mobile versions using Chrome’s developer tools. eBay is suppose to grab 800 characters from your description and initially show them to mobile users according to the following web page.

http://pages.ebay.com/sell/itemdescription/customizeyoursummary.html

eBay is displaying the phrase “_gsrx_vers_632 (GS 6.9.8 (632)).” and then randomly grabs the same section of text from the bottom of my listing. The bottom of my listing are my terms of service. The actual details about the item at the top of the description are totally ignored. The first part of that information eBay is inserting is not actually typed in the description or in the html - it appears eBay is getting that as part of the upload process from GS.

The above web page web says you can control this content by placing this code around the description.

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

That page says basic html tags could be used between the span tags; however, a test listing with only two paragraphs that included only a couple div and br tags appears to not make that eBay code work. If I removed the div and br tags from the description then eBay’s code would correctly insert the first part of my description; however, that would make full description not easy to read as there would be no way to have paragraphs and styling.

The only solution I found was to instead use a default generic message which would not be displayed in the actual description using a inline style but which would be passed onto eBay to initially display to mobile users.

<div vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="Product">
<span property="description" style="display: none;">
My default message.
</span>
</div>

<div class="deswrapper">
[[description]]
</div>

Also when I run spell checks the first word that comes up in any template is “_gsrx_vers_632” even though this appears nowhere in the preview or editor mode.

We are adding the current version of GarageSale as hidden HTML to the end of each description, so our support team can tell the GarageSale version when a customer sends them the link to a listing. This seems to clash with eBay’s new summary feature. We’ll try to figure out a way to get around this.

Thanks!

Sounds like eBay’s algorithm for excising the text they think is important is not written that well. I’ve seem multiple posts on eBay’s forum where other users, most of whom do not use GS, were complaining about eBay grabbing random text from their listings that made no sense.

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