When listing to ebay via ChannelGrabber, you can enter the description text in the listing tool, then apply a HTML design to the description to make it look more professional.  As well as making your listing look good, this can also be used to provide other important information for your customer, such as company info, returns policy, shipping services etc. to enhance your customer’s buying experience and manage their expectations (and protect yourself against negative feedback).

We do not offer a template design service ourselves, but if you are comfortable with HTML, you can create your own or use an existing template from your ebay store, or we do partner with an excellent e-commerce design company called dZine-Hub if you want to get a new template professionally designed for your business (just make sure to tell them you are a ChannelGrabber user so they can ensure compatibility with the system).

1.  Navigate to Settings – Templates – ebay Listing Templates in your account:

2.  In the Add Template field, enter the name of your new template then click the New button to open a blank template:

3.  Enter or copy and paste your HTML code for your template into the ebay Template Designer field.  If you are copying an existing template from ebay, then it will probably have details of an existing product in it, so you will need to find any text that is for a specific product, and replace it with our dynamic data tags.

For Example:  If you have pulled in HTML for a listing with the title “Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy (Blu-ray)” it could look something like this in the code:

 <div id="item_title">Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy (Blu-ray)</div>

Where the actual title text is, you would replace that with the tag  {{title}} so the code would then look like this:

 <div id="item_title">{{title}}</div>

This will then mean that when this template is applied to a different product, it will pull in the correct title for the new product, instead of just using the existing title from the original listing.

You can use the following tags in your HTML template, to pull info from different fields in ChannelGrabber:

{{title}}  
The title added in the Title box on the eBay listing profile 

{{description}}  
 The description added in the Description box on the ebay listing profile (whatever formatting you apply in ChannelGrabber will automatically be fed through to your template, unless the template code already specifies font sizes, colours etc.) 

{{image1}}    
The first/main image you have uploaded for the product in the general IMAGES tab
​
​{{image2}} … {{imageN}}    
Other images in ChannelGrabber.  “N” is the number of the image, so you can insert as many images as you have uploaded for the product (see the general IMAGES tab if you get stuck: each image has its tag beneath it on this page) 

{{image1-100}} … {{imageN-100}}    
Dynamically-resized thumbnail - this scales the image down and sets the largest dimension to the number following the "-" in the tag (in pixels) so “-100” means the longest side would be confined to 100 pixels

{{bin}}    
The Buy It Now Price field from the eBay listing profile INFORMATION tab 

{{sku}}    
The SKU field from the “General” tab of the product in CG

{{brand}}    
The Brand field from the “General” tab of the product in CG 

{{manufacturer}}    
The Manufacturer field from the “General” tab of the product in CG 

{{barcode}}
The Barcode field from the “General” tab of the product in CG 

{{weight}}    
The Weight field from the “General” tab of the product in CG 

{{tax}}    
The Tax/VAT rate applied from the “General” tab of the product in CG 

{{condition}}    
The Condition field from the eBay listing profile INFORMATION tab 

In addition to all the normal data fields that the template can pull info from, you can also create your own tags.  This can be done from two places, Product Custom Fields (see separate guide) or ebay Item Specifics / Custom Specifics (these load in the ebay listing profile once you have selected your primary category:

For example, in this case, you could enter the following in your template: “Format: {{Format}}” and then on the listing, your customer would see “Format: Blu-ray”. 

Bear in mind that if you do write this into your code, then “Format:” will appear on every template, so if it’s a different type of product that doesn’t have the format item specific, then this could make your template look untidy.

A good solution if you do want to use item specifics, but have different types of items, is to have multiple templates saved in ChannelGrabber, one for each different type of listing eg. DVDs/Blu-rays Template, Clothing Template, Food Template etc.  There is no limit to how many templates you can save in ChannelGrabber, and you can simply select the relevant template at the time of creating the listing.

1.  Once you have finished setting up your template, make sure to click the Save button next to the template name at the top right hand side of the page:

2.  There is a Preview Template link on the ebay Listing Templates page, however this will only work if your listings were created in ChannelGrabber or only have plain text descriptions.  If we have imported existing listings from ebay that contain HTML in the description already, then you will end up with a template within a template, which can be confusing.

If you want to apply your new template to existing/active ebay listings in bulk via the Data Exchange, you will need the Template ID, which can also be found here, above the Preview Template link.  Please see separate guides on using the Data Exchange.

3.  a)  To apply your template to a new or existing ebay listing manually, please go to your Products page and create a new product (see separate guides on “Creating a New Single/Variation Product” and “Listing a Product to eBay”)  or click onto an existing Product Name to open the product details:

b)  Click on the Listings tab then the Edit link on the ebay listing profile to access the ebay details:

c) On the Description tab, you will see your description text.  You can format the font however you like using the formatting bar, then from the QuickLoad bar at the top of the page, click on the Design drop-down menu to view the available templates, then select the one you want to apply:

d) Once you have selected a template, you can click on the Preview Template link to the top left of the description field, which will open a new tab in your browser to show you what your complete description will look like when submitted to ebay:

e) If this is a new listing then you will need to complete the rest of the listing fields too (see separate guide on “Listing a Product to eBay”, but if you are simply adding a template to an existing listing, you can now click the Revise button at the top right of the page to apply your template to your existing active listing.

If you then want to check it on ebay directly, a link will show on the ebay profile line in the Listings tab, so you can quickly and easily follow that link to go to your live listing on ebay.

We hope this guide is helpful, but if you require further assistance, please get in touch with the Support Team.