Using CSS to markup eBay auctions

December 6, 2004

A couple of years ago (back in 2001) I was on an eBay kick and decided that the best way to make my auctions stand out more than all the other auctions was to try to make them look nicer. Most people just type out their product description or lift the description from an e-commerce site and then slap some tacky/gawdy font and color choices. Back then I was only dabbling in CSS could only convince myself to use CSS to mark-up my table layout with some attractive color combinations and fonts. Nothing too extreme or groundbreaking. I didn’t run with it very far (I only did 3 auctions that way) because it was a pain to update the content with all the table cells and layout mixed in with the content.

Since 2001 I have accumulated a number of items that I have been stacking up in the corner of the office with the intention of putting them on eBay. Of course, being caught up with the concept of wanting to sell the items in a presentation that is unique and different from all the other auctions out there, they just sat and continued to pile up. Finally, I’ve reached a point in my life where I feel like I can (and need) to move this eBay stuff out. Many factors needed to align to make me reach this decision, not the least of which is my wife pressuring me to clean up my corner. Most importantly, browsers have improved their support and implementation of CSS standards and I have become competent enough to come up with compelling designs and I have seen the light in regards to writing content unencumbered by layout markup. While there are still issues with the current browsers and not everyone is running IE6 or Firefox, it is now much easier to develop a site via CSS and have it render similarly across browsers.

So without further ado, I present my first ebay template done completely with CSS for presentation:
Sony Discman Portable CD Player D-33 + Accessories

All visual aspects are handled via an external stylesheet. The actual auction description content is just some container divs for grouping and then standard heading, paragraph, list and image tags. Unlike Hack #43. Overriding eBay’s Fonts and Styles from O’Reilly Network: Hacking eBay, I specifically chose not to change any of the styling outside of my own auction. Sure, I could change the whole page color or fonts, but my goal was to keep the content of my auction entirely self-contained.

Some interesting side effects of using an external style sheet: First, because I am linking to an external stylesheet on my web server, I could change the look and feel of the item at will. Once I have multiple templates to choose from, it would be really easy to code up some logic to change the style sheet on every request or every day, etc. The second side effect that is potentially a little unnerving and which would cause eBay the most grief is because I control the style sheet outside of the auction, I could display false information while the auction is running, and then after the auction closes, modify the style to hide the false info and display new info to alter the original auction listing. Of course, a quick look at the HTML source would show all the information, but how many people who don’t have a clue about such thing could be defrauded?

Anyway, I hope that this benefits someone and inspires someone else to make their auctions nicer. My next step is to create a CodeSmith template so that I can easily churn out new auctions. I’m pretty sure there is some money to be made somewhere in here, but not quite sure how to tap into it.

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under CSS, General, eBay | 6 Comments 

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