How to make your listings ready for eBay's new policies (https, links, active content)

GarageSale
1

Overview

Due to new eBay policies links to non-eBay websites, including links to images, are no longer allowed. Links are only allowed if they conform to eBay’s link policy, e.g. you can still link to your eBay store, other eBay pages or to a YouTube video.

Also, eBay requires all resources (e.g. images) that are embedded in the listing description to use the secure HTTPS protocol instead of non-secure HTTP protocol, e.g. images that use a “http://” URL.

“Active content” is forbidden in eBay listings (JavaScript, Plug-ins or Flash, iFrame and Form actions, embedded YouTube videos).

It might be needed to revise listings started with earlier versions of GarageSale to make them eBay compliant.

Making your listings ready for eBay’s new policies

The default footer, the design templates and image links in GarageSale 7.0.9 and higher are updated and compliant to all eBay policies. If not done already, please read our blog post here: GarageSale 7.0.9 supports eBay’s new Link Policy

This is what you should to update your affected listings:

  1. Please download or update to the latest version of GarageSale (version 7.0.9).
  2. If you're using a design from the Design Store, please update it as well: Select "Show Design Templates" (Window menu), then click on the download buttton (arrow icon) in the toolbar.
  3. To make sure there're no additional links or http content in your item description you can use the "Repair Image Links" command from the "Listing" menu. This command is especially useful if you imported listings from "My eBay", which contain image links and http image URLs in the description. **Please note:** The "Repair Image Links" command is only used for http image links you manually inserted into your listing description text! Images added to your listing by GarageSale get fixed automatically when invoking the "Revise" command!
  4. Restore the default GarageSale footer: In the GarageSale preferences > General click on "Edit", then click on "Restore Default" and "OK".
  5. **This is the most important step:** Invoke the revise command from the toolbar to upload the updated listings. In the revise panel you can choose "Revise entire listing". If needed, you can revise multiple listings at once. Once revised from within GarageSale all the listings should be compliant to eBay's new policies.

Bulk-Revising multiple active listing (optional)

You maybe need to only revise a few listings but if you want to revise multiple listing at once it might be helpful to create a smart group that contains all your active listings. Create a new smart group and use these rules:

  • State > is > Running with bids or sales
  • State > is > Running without bids or sales
Select the listings in that smart group and invoke the Revising Listing command from the toolbar.

Good to Know

  • If you are using your own image server with GarageSale via FTP or webDAV, please make sure that your server is supporting HTTPS requests for your images resources. If your server already supports HTTPS requests, makes sure the the "Download URL" field in GarageSale's configuration for your server starts with "https://" instead of "http://", so you are compliant with the new eBay rules.
  • GarageSale's listing designs don't make use of "active content". However, if you've added video (e.g. from YouTube or Vimeo) to your description you might want to remove it.
  • Make sure you don't have inserted own HTTP image URLs in your item description, footer, info boxes etc. HTTP-URLs start with "http://", like this: http://www.domain.com/images/image.jpg If supported by your server you can simply change the URLs to "https://".
  • If you're using your own custom listing design, please make sure it's compliant to the eBay policies.

Please let us know if you have further question or need help with these instructions.
Regards, Kristian