As you may already know eBay has been placing a notice at the top of listings about active content. These notices can only be seen when you are logged into your account and can’t be seen by any buyers. If you utilize the “Preview” link in this notice to view your listing with any active content now disabled you will see that any links you have to externally hosted pictures do not work. Clicking on such images will not longer open a new browser tab or window.
If you use the following tool from eBay’s forums you will see that the links are being targeted as active content. After the page has been loaded into this tool the code can can be seen under the “Markup” subtab under the main “Show/Hide” tab.
http://www.isdntek.com/ebaytools/ActiveContentSandbox.htm
I have been using a free image hosting site called use.com for images, but recently have been thinking of switching to a paid server with ftp as this will save having to paste the html code from the free service into each listing for each group of images I upload. Both of these strategies now seem a rather moot point if eBay intends on banning clickable links on image thumbnails.
Can this be fixed? Without the ability to provide buyers access to full sized images GS becomes utterly worthless.
I fail to understand eBay at all on this matter. eBay Pictures Services is not able to show my images at their full size - they are all downsized. A uncropped photo from my camera (5184 x 3456) is only shown at 30% of its original size by EPS. The maximum width EPS shows pictures is 1599, which means most pictures from my camera are reduced in size by EPS.
On the other hand eBay is now also banning links to full sized images embedded within the description. This makes no sense at all and will only lead to problems with buyers who now can’t see the fine detail in antiques and collectibles. I previously had conducted a test using a image of a oil painting. When viewed on EPS the artist’s brush strokes in the painting were no longer visible yet were still visible in my externally hosted images.
eBay’s “customer service” actually suggested I now take photos with a camera phone to cut down on their size so eBay does not downsize them or that I reduce their size using a online editing program. The purpose of using my $1,200 camera and my copy of Photoshop CS is to make high quality photos for buyers! I received several other similar “insane” answers from eBay’s customer service strongly suggesting that they don’t really care at all - as usual. If someone that worked for me gave one of my customers the type of answers I received from eBay customer service they would be immediately fired from their jobs.