If you’ve decided not to build your own HTML page for eBay, or utilize one of the standard templates discussed previously, you’ll still need to incorporate pictures into your auction so folks have a good feel for what you have for sale. EBay has provided 2 tools for inclusion of pictures into the auction description. These are the Enhance Picture Services and Basic Picture Services. With either tool you can upload, super size and create a slideshow (for multiple pictures). More on these tools in a bit.
When I put an item up for auction, it will always have a good mix of ‘superb quality’ photos. I want the people who are bidding on my auctions to have no questions about what they are buying. The more someone knows about what they are buying before it arrives in their mail, the more likely you are to have a satisfied customer who will do future business with you. Get shots from every angle. I even include shots of the bottom. All shots included in the page description have links for full size (but Adobe Photoshop optimized) photos so that bidders can get up close and personal with what they are bidding on.
You should always use an optimization program to decrease the size of your photos. When I take shots of my items, I am typically set to a picture resolution of 2280 X 1520 or higher to make sure that the picture details are preserved for my description’s picture reduction. Why do I want to reduce the picture for my main description page? Basically to make sure that my auction’s download time is less than 30 seconds. Then I use hyperlinks from each picture to allow bidders to see the full sized pictures (although I typically reduce these to no more than 800 pixels wide or 600 pixels tall). As I mentioned earlier, Adobe Photoshop also has a feature that allows you to reduce the resolution of the picture (optimization), and thereby reduce the size of the picture that is placed in your description, and hyperlinked full sized photo’s. For most photos you can set the optimization to 65% and still get great pictures.
One last note for your hyperlinked pictures. Make sure to always launch them in new windows. A typical HTML command to do this is:
<a href="http://www.yourwebsite.com/YourPictureBIG.jpg">
<img border="0" src http://www.yourwebsite.com/YourPictureSMALL.jpg"></a>