Yesterday I was asked to design and completely customize an Ebay Shop, I had seen it done before by some large companies trading on Ebay such as Schuh, so I rose to the challenge.
Ebay make the shops fool proof and ‘easy’ for shop owners to add brand identities and style, it’s understanding as the appeal of Ebay trading is that anyone can do it no matter what their business background or web development knowledge. However Ebay make it extremely hard for web developers to customize beyond this and to make shops attractive and unique is a challenge.
I had 24 hours of free time on this project so I worked through the night on a design and began implementing it on the Ebay shop. The only place Ebay allows developers to insert HTML or any code is in the header, so I created an external style sheet that contained CSS to style all the basic assets in a shop – items, categories, the Ebay frame, search boxes, etc. I then created a custom header to make the shop look more like a typical website and less like a standard Ebay shop, I wanted to improve the customers experience and make their visit more pleasant and efficient to benefit both the customer and my client.
Unfortunately Ebay shop frames and all their components are created using hundreds of nested tables with very few unique classes or ID’s so styling is not for the faint hearted or un-experienced.
My results can be found here: (link to Settle Down Books) and early results are promising sales are at a high for early January!
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