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.

First you will need to obtain your HTML code for your existing eBay Template.  You may have the original code if you designed it yourself, or your designer has provided it to you, or if not, you can edit any existing eBay listing that has the template applied.

Once editing the listing on eBay, find the Item description section and click on the HTML tab:

The full HTML description for that specific product will then be available to you, so select it all and copy the code to your clipboard (Ctrl+A, then Ctrl+C on a Windows PC, or Cmd(⌘)+A, then Cmd (⌘)+C on a Mac):

1. Navigate to Settings > Product Management > Listing Templates:

2.  The first time you access this section you will need to enter the name you want to assign to your template in CG in the Add Template section then click the New button:

3.  The Template Designer field will then load.  Click into the empty box and paste (Ctrl+P or Cmd(⌘)+P) your HTML code that you copied from your source code or an existing eBay listing as above, or you can of course write your own code into this field if you are designing your own template:

If you are copying an existing template from eBay, then it will contain the 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 so that CG can insert the data for different products into the same template.  

Similarly, if your template was obtained from another software system or designer, it may have its own version of these tags, so these will need to be replaced in the same way for use in CG.

To do this, you would highlight the part of the code that you want to replace, delete it, and then click on the tag that you want to insert from the drop-down menu, then click the Add tag button to put the tag into the template:

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

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

 <div class="item_title">{{product.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.
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If you are writing your own code outside of CG or commissioning a template from a design company, then this list of the tags may be easier to utilise.  You can use the following tags in your HTML template, to pull info from different product and listing fields in ChannelGrabber:

{{product.sku}}
The SKU of the item*
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​{{product.title}}  
The title of the item as it appears on the listing tool in CG
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​{{product.tax}}  
The VAT Rate/percentage as applied to the product in CG
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​{{product.image1}}
The URL of the first/main image of the product as it was imported or uploaded in CG
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​{{product.image2}} ... {{product.image12}}
Other image URLs for the product in CG.  The number at the end of the tag is the number of the image in the same order that the image was imported or uploaded to CG in, so you can insert as many image tags into the template as you need (max. 12) for example, if your template contains a gallery that you want to fill with multiple images of the product or variations.
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​{{productDetail.description}}  
The description added in the Description box on the ebay listing tool in CG.  You can use the template code to set the font, size, colour etc. for the text here if required as well.
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​{{productDetail.brand}}  
The Brand field from the eBay listing in CG
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​{{productDetail.mpn}}  
The MPN field from the eBay listing in CG*
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​{{productDetail.ean}}  
The EAN field from the eBay listing in CG*
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​{{productDetail.upc}}  
The UPC field from the eBay listing in CG*
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​{{productDetail.isbn}}  
The ISBN field from the eBay listing in CG*
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​{{productDetail.barcode}}  
A "catch all" tag that you can use rather than each individual product identifier tag above (MPN/EAN/UPC/ISBN) - ie. if you enter this tag in your template CG will insert the first content it finds from any of the four product identifier fields in CG, meaning you can use the same template for a cushion with an EAN as you can for a book with an ISBN*
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​{{productDetail.weight}}  
The Weight in KG from the Products page in CG*
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​{{productDetail.length}}
The Length in CM from the Products page in CG*
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{{productDetail.width}}  
The Width in CM from the Products page in CG*
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​{{productDetail.height}}  
The Height in CM from the Products page in CG*
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​{{productDetail.condition}}  
The Condition field from the eBay listing in CG
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​{{productDetail.price}}  
The retail price of the item from the eBay listing in CG*
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​{{productDetail.cost}}
The Cost Price from the Products page in CG*
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* These fields would be left blank in the template if you are listing a variation product with multiple options to choose from, as only data entered on a single or parent product level would be shown with a value in these fields
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Once you have replaced any text in your original template with the ChannelGrabber template tags as needed, you can preview it to check it will display correctly when we submit your listings to eBay using your template.

To do so, under the Template Designer box, simply click the Preview button and a new window will open in your browser to show you how it will look in the description box on eBay:

Note:
The preview will show pre-set product details for an example product "Wooden Outdoor Garden Set" so don't be surprised if you don't recognise this product as it won't be something from your inventory.

If you have not listed through ChannelGrabber before, we recommend to start by following our detailed guide on how to Create a Listing

When completing the eBay section of the listing process, you will see a drop-down section for Listing Template where you can select from any templates that you have previously created, so simply select the one you wish to apply to the listing you are going to submit to eBay:

And there you have it!  :)  Your eBay listings that are created in ChannelGrabber will now have your stylish design applied when submitted to eBay.

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