Designing Your eBay Listing with Turbo Lister

By Marsha Collier from eBay Business All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition

When it comes to designing your listing, eBay's Turbo Lister is a great tool. With Turbo Lister, you can create an eBay listing that looks good, covers all the bases, and attracts and impresses potential buyers. All you need is a few of Turbo Lister's tools:

WYSIWYG HTML design form: When you're in the Create New Item form, this feature is somewhat hidden. By clicking on the words Description Builder, a new window pops up to reveal the form. You can base your ad on this very easy-to-use design tool. In Design View, it has a toolbar similar to the formatting toolbar in Microsoft Word, so the buttons should be familiar.

The design toolbar in Turbo Lister.
Templates and themes: You’ve probably seen eBay listings with nice graphics in the borders. These come from eBay’s easy-to-use theme templates, which are listed on the left side of the screen. You can select any of these colorful templates to doll up your listing.
Layout: These options are available only if you pay for using Designer. You may select from Standard, Photos Left, Photos Right, One Photo Top, Photos Bottom, or Slide Show.

When you use eBay Picture Services, the first picture is free. By using your first free picture, you can have a great-looking header picture at the top of your listing page. Additional pictures are $.15, and a slide show costs you the princely sum of $.75.

Inserting a photo URL in the description area.

eBay has graciously included a photo-icon tool that allows you to include your own images from the Web without paying eBay their requisite $.15 a picture. There’s also a command to insert a hyperlink into your description so a prospective buyer can e-mail you with a click of the mouse.

Inserting an e-mail link in the description area.
HTML view: If you have some HTML knowledge, you may want to edit your listing design in HTML view. You can also insert your hosted images by entering supplementary coding into the HTML view. Also, if you have your own predesigned template, you can copy and paste the HTML for the template into the HTML view box.

Be sure to add at least one picture using eBay’s Picture Services so you can use the free header picture. Just click one of the boxes labeled Click Here to Insert Picture, and select any picture on your computer’s hard drive. When your picture appears in the Turbo Lister box, click Next.

At the end of the Create New Item form is a Save as Template button. Suppose you’ve finally designed a simple template that you’d like to use over and over for your auctions. You can save any listing you’ve created as a template — and then merely substitute the new text the next time you want to use that template format.