Now it has become an old news. We all know about eBay’s decision to remove all active contents from the site. This is one on the cons of selling on eBay where you have to stay ready to adopt biggest changes frequently. Never mind, even with these cons we know that selling on eBay is important.
How will it affect the eBay sellers?
Many eBay sellers use listing templates to make their product listing look nice and standing out. So, far almost all of these templates made use of active contents. eBay sellers who also have their own eCommerce site use eBay integration modules to manage the eBay listing from their a site itself. Many of these integration solutions also use active contents.
By active content, we mean that piece of code which runs a script on the page. According to eBay, active content that they would ban includes “JavaScript, Flash, Plug-ins, and form actions that can create features such as cross-platform promotion or video embedding”
With eBay banning these active contents, templates using such contents will no longer function. In the worst case, the seller using the active content after June 2017 would loose the listings after these listings being removed by the eBay.
So, you must make sure you are all ready and compliant with the new rules before June rolls up and kills your listing.
How can you know whether you comply or not?
eBay refers to this testing tool for sellers to check the mobile friendliness of their listings.
Moreover, eBay also provides a preview mode to see how your listing would look without active content.
“To use the tool, view your item page and click the preview option in the item description tab. This preview link is only visible to you, the seller. Buyers cannot see this option and previewing the item does not alter the description in any way.”
Why is eBay making this huge change?
According to eBay “The use of active content in listings, including JavaScript, Flash, plug-ins and form actions, can negatively impact the user experience by inhibiting mobile purchasing, increasing page load times, and increasing security vulnerabilities”
eBay understands the importance of being mobile friendly and knows that hassle-free mobile experience is the biggest requirement here. As many of eBay sales involve at least one visit from the mobile device, ignoring the mobile experience is what eBay is looking for.
While active contents like Flash fails to load properly or even at all on the mobile devices, they degrade the customer experience ultimately degrading the site’s name, and eBay does not seem to be in a mood to tolerate this.
Do not forget the impact on the page load speed it will have after removing the active contents. The page load speed can be exponentially improved by removing such contents.
The most important concern behind active contents that eBay revealed was the security threats. Active content can lead to security issues, like injection of malware to the pages which would also infect the eBay users’ devices.
Most interesting thing that eBay came up is telling sellers that they can enjoy improved exposure to search engines if they remove the active contents. How? eBay didn’t explain that, but I guess, without active contents the listing would go mobile-friendly and since Google uses mobile friendliness as one of ranking signals, it would improve the visibility and ranking on the Google search engine.
How to adopt eBay’s new guidelines?
With the notification regarding active content, eBay has also released a guidance for what you need to do to adopt the new changes. They have clearly notified that users need to remove all their active contents and use alternatives wherever applicable. If you use template, integration tool, and other such tools from third parties, you need to speak to them and get an information on what they are doing to make their solution comply with active content guidelines.
One thing that is worth to note here is that eBay statement:
“If you are a new Store subscriber, we highly recommend that you do not invest in any custom html stores experience, as this will not be supported long term”
eBay suggests an alternative way- stick with the native eBay stores experience. It clearly implies that eBay is planning to completely deactivate the custom template use in coming future. For the time being, it’s not a problem as it will take some time. However, it’s important to comply with the guidelines if you are using templates now.
Is PrestaShop eBay Integration module safe?
If you are using our PrestaShop eBay Marketplace Integration module or thinking about using it, you need not worry about the active content compliance. There are two reasons for that:
- It is not a shop template module, it is an eBay listing management solution that enables a PrestaShop store owner to manage his/her eBay listings from PrestaShop store itself. So, it does not target the product front pages, instead, it targets the product listing.
- It uses the simple Native eBay product listing steps to map the PrestaShop listing with eBay listing following eBay product listing guidelines. So, there is no chance that it uses the active content.
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