Best practices for creating mobile-friendly eBay listings

With more than half of all transactions on eBay viewed on a mobile device prior to purchase, it's important to make sure your listings look great on mobile.

Tips to make your listings more mobile-friendly

Make sure your font is legible on mobile

  • Review your font specifications. eBay recommends using a base font size of 16 CSS pixels and sticking to one or two font sizes. Using this strategy should eliminate the need for a shopper to pinch to zoom and read content.

  • Keep the formatting simple on a white background for easy readability. Use bullet points in items descriptions so information is easy to scan.

No horizontal scrolling

  • Use the viewport meta tag.
    The viewport meta tag communicates to mobile browsers how to adjust the dimensions and scaling of the item description in order to render properly on a mobile device. For example, include the following line of code in your item description:<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
    When setting the viewport, do not use fixed-width values, because this will cause your item description to render incorrectly for some device sizes.

  • Make sure that all item description elements scale across device sizes.
    Do not set absolute values in CSS declarations and make sure inline images scale well across screen sizes. In practice, this should prevent any mobile browser from rendering horizontal scrollbars, which are not mobile-friendly.

eBay Gallery Images

  • Photo Uploader: use the eBay photo uploader, instead of images in the description, to upload up to 12 photos (24 for Motors listings) free of charge. Take a look at the eBay photo tips help topic for advice on making sure photos look great on mobile devices.

Perhaps the most important tips:

  • Include the correct product identifiers and item specifics when listing - so that important information about your item is included by eBay on mobile devices.
    Increasingly buyers search using filters. This means your listings will only be displayed in those search results if you have completed the matching item specific information. If you haven't added the matching items specifics, your listing may be excluded from filtered search results.

  • Use eBay listing fields to include your postage, payment and returns information. This is far more effective than trying to clump all of that info into your description.

  • Do not use active content, including JavaScript, Flash and form actions.

Nerada Stern