It is the role of a designer to create something useful and beautiful, within the constraints of the medium they are working with. No matter how wonderful a four colour advert may be, it would be a poor design for a black and white newspaper.

Changes to eBay’s active content policy have meant that eBay designers have had to re adjust the specifications they work to.

Ebay’s new active content policy does not restrict design. The new policy acts as a guideline to ensure that all design on the eBay platform is high quality, fast loading, mobile compatible and secure. There is no need for sellers to sacrifice any of the design features which help them to brand and personalise their listings and encourage increased sales.

We know that without technical design knowledge, it can be difficult to know if you are getting the most for your money within this new specification. That is why we have put together this brief list of seven essential questions to ask any eBay designer, to help you make the best-informed decision for your business

1. Do you offer active content free design?

This is probably the most important question at the moment, as design on eBay listings using JavaScript, flash and html forms will be blocked by eBay from June 2017. If you want your design to last beyond June, it needs to be active content free.

2. Will my new design still have automated dynamic categories or will it be hardcoded?

No doubt over the course of your business you will be adding and removing categories. This is a common practice when introducing new product lines, or removing old ones. In a store with hard coded categories, this would mean taking down each product listing, and adjusting each one manually. This would cost you time and worse still, delete your sales history and ranking.

3. Will my new design have automated dynamic cross promotion or will it be hardcoded?

Cross selling features in eBay designs can be dynamic, or hard coded. There is a very non technical reason why it matters which you choose.

Dynamic cross promotion scans through your live listings, and automatically shows related products, based on the rules you set. The rules could be size, colour, any relevant feature. It will only connect listings which are relevant and live.

4. Will I need to cut and paste html into listings?

Having to cut and paste html to revise listings is not just massively inconvenient and time consuming the first time your apply the listing design, it is a continuous time drain. Each time you want to make a simple amendment such as your shipping or returns policy text, you would need to manually edit every one of your listings.

5. Would I have to provide you with my login details for my eBay account?

You should never risk the security of the login details for the platform where you run your business, and handle sales and payments. Here at Frooition, we install our designs using eBay’s API. This means that you never need to hand over any sensitive information or login details; guaranteeing the integrity of your eBay security.

6. Do you store my new design, graphics and CSS on a dedicated server using Multi location data-centres?

This may sound alarmingly technical, but it’s really very simple and  important for anyone buying an eBay design to understand. Ebay designs which sit on a single server in house are not stable. Because when the server goes down, (which they sometimes do) your eBay listings will be broken until the server issue is fixed. It is common for servers to be down for a whole day. Ask yourself how much revenue would you lose if none of your customers could purchase your products for a day? Worse still, if it happens on a Friday evening, your listings could be down all weekend.

With Frooition servers, your template load from a node closest to where your customer is located, meaning quicker load times. If that server fails, it simply relocates to the next available node. This service maintains 99.9% uptime.  Meaning no downtime for your listings

7. Is the new design applied to my existing items?

This is a huge deal. It can take days or weeks to manually insert a design into your eBay listings, and even longer if you already have a design applied. Worse still, your listings may contain old active content, which would need to be removed before you even started applying the new design. Here at Frooition, we do all the work for you. If your listings are in eBay’s standard format (meaning you don’t have a design), Frooition will install the design into your live listings, no matter how many listings you have. In most cases, even if you have an active content within your existing design, we can clear that out for you, and insert your brand new design as a part of the service. Saving you valuable time and money.