eBay Hacks

Host Your Own Photos

Bypass eBay’s photo restrictions by hosting auction photos on your own server.

Any photos that appear in your auctions must be stored on a web server somewhere; which one you use is up to you. When you use eBay’s Picture Services, you’re instructing eBay to store your photos on their own dedicated picture server and link them to your auction automatically. While this is the easiest and most convenient way to host photos, it’s also fraught with limitations.

Hosting photos off-eBay has tons of advantages over using eBay’s Picture Services (ePS). For instance, you can:

• Include as many photos as you like in any auction at no additional charge.

• Include photos of any size with no “supersize” fees. With ePS, photos are limited to 400 × 300, or, for an additional fee, 800 × 600 (supersize).

Tip

Large photos are more striking and show much more detail than small ones, and will end up getting you more bids. The problem with eBay’s supersize photos is that they appear only when bidders click the Supersize Picture links beneath the thumbnails. If you host your own photos, you can put the large versions right in the auction (as many as you like), so your bidders don’t have to click to see them. This is especially helpful if you choose to create a photo collage [Hack #63].

• Control the quality (compression) settings of your JPG photos. ePS has a tendency to over-compress photos, which reduces detail and increases fuzziness.

• Use very long or very wide images that don’t conform ...