Anyone who buys or sells anything on Ebay will notice that some auctions look more professional than others. We all probably know that Ebay charge a small fortune for listing an item(s) simply because although they let you have one photograph of your item for free, they charge 12p per photo after that; and you are limited to only having a maximum of 12 photographs on your listing…which works out at £1.32 for the photos alone if you choose this option, and then they charge another few bob to add one of their templates to your listing.
Heaven Templates (now referred to as HT) is one of a few options you have to make your Ebay auctions a lot cheaper in the long term to run.
HT is primarily a photo hosting website which for a small fee will host your photographs until you are ready to use them. But that is not all they do, they also have a vast range of pre-designed Ebay auction templates for you to use (all included in the fee) I will go into each part of the site in more detail for you and explain how even a complete novice at using html codes can quickly get started.
First of all you have the home page. This is a nice welcoming page in white with blue background and headings. It has a cartoon picture of a woman sitting at a PC (I assume this is meant to be the woman who is in charge of the site.) The opening heading of the site is "No HTML knowledge required, unlimited auction templates, Unlimited about me designs and Customised Name tags"
At the moment there are 104 categories for the auction templates, with 1166 templates, but she does add to these all the time. Here is an example of some of the categories; American
Patriotic - Angels - Funky Fun - (one of my favourites) Etc….. I am not going to mention them all as you can pop over to the site and see them for yourself. You can also have a look at things before signing up to anything to see if there's anything that you like before you go ahead and part with your cash. There is a free demo for you to see how things work, and to show you how easy it is to use (and believe me if I can use it then anyone can)
Now you have had a look at a selection of the templates available, and you have had a chance to check out the demonstration and have decided you quite like the idea of having a more professional looking Ebay auction, the next thing you need to know is how much it is going to cost you. This will be purely down to; a) How much space you need to store photos. b) How much you actually sell on your auction site. c) How much you can afford to part with monthly. There are 8 price plan options which are pretty simple to work out.
Plan 1 offers 50 mb image hosting. No bandwidth limits. No auto deletion of images. Unlimited use of auction templates. Unlimited use of about me templates. No HTML knowledge needed. Listings automatically generated. Customise your templates. Logos & name tag maker. Fun Sigtags. Image Cropping, Resize and Rotate Extra backgrounds. Easy to use HTML Editor Only: £1.99 per month
This is the plan I use and is more than enough for my needs, I mainly sell things my children have outgrown or things I don't need. The 50mb image hosting is quite a lot and I've never needed more than this.
The other plans are exactly the same except for the image hosting: Plan 2 offers 150mb image hosting for £2.99 per month Plan 3 offers 300mb image hosting for £3.50 per month Plan 4 offers unlimited image hosting for £3.99 per month Plan 5 offers 150mb image hosting for £2.99 per month but with a FREE 7 day trial Plan 6 offers unlimited image hosting for £8.99 for 3 months. Plan 7 offers unlimited image hosting for £20 for 6 months. Plan 8 offers unlimited image hosting for £35 for a year.
As you can see none of this is going to break the bank and if I decide to sell more on Ebay (perhaps if you have an Ebay store) then I would definitely upgrade to one of the unlimited image hosting plans. As they are obviously better value for money.
Now if you have an Ebay account then you will probably have a Paypal account too? You will need one to pay the subscription costs! I have never had any problems with them taking more than the agreed amount from my account monthly.
It is easy to join up…simply click on the join us button and fill in the details asked for - full name, a username, a password and your email address, and also your paypal email address too. You will need to supply your Ebay username too. They also ask how you heard about them…feel free to tell them it was me who told you (If you do this ask me for my username and I will tell you in private guestbook) Never know maybe I'll get a discount lol. Finally choose which subscription plan you want and Hey presto it takes you to your paypal page to pay it…this is safe as it has the padlock sign at bottom of page.
Once you have joined up it really is simple to use, sign in with your username and password and off you go. First thing I recommend is to go to "My preferences" this is where you can set up the basic information that you want to include in all of your auctions eg. Your payment terms (what payments you accept, and if you exchange/refund that sort of thing) your shipping terms and Additional info that you want your customers to know. This will appear in all of your auctions but can be changed at any time.
The next thing you should do is to upload your photographs. Now this is the part where it can get a little annoying; I've noticed recently that this is really slow and sometimes the photos
Pictures of heaventemplates.co.uk
An example of a title page
aren't saving….I have contacted them to ask why this is and see if it can get fixed as it never used to be like this, I am currently awaiting a reply. I will let you know the outcome. In the meantime I have been uploading one photo at a time rather than using the multiple image upload which takes forever.(15 photos can be uploaded at a time normally) You can create different categories or directories as they are called on the site, and upload your photos into them..eg. Books, Girls clothes, Boys clothes etc….
There is a little extra heading of Sigtags…these are fun GIF images that you can save to your computer, then add to your auctions; images such as "I prefer Paypal" or "read my 100% feedback" to name a few.
So now you've joined up, uploaded your photos and found the template you wish to use; what next? You click on the USE TEMPLATE button on the template of your choice…I would recommend you click on NO photos, as you can add these manually and get a better control of where they go and what size they are. You are now ready to go…add all the information about your auction and then click on the EDIT TEMPLATE button at the bottom of the page. A new box will open with the template generator, click on the "copy to clipboard" button and then scroll to bottom of page. There are 3 tabs at the bottom of the box…click on the HTML code tab and then scroll up to top of box…delete the text you see there and then right click and paste. The HTML code will then appear for you. Scroll back down to the bottom of the box again…and click the DESIGN tab….your auction template will now appear. All you have to do now is add the photographs. To do this, simply click the yellow picture postcard on the top line beside the smiley face. A box will pop up and you simply go back to your heaven templates My PHOTOS (make sure this is done on a separate box) find the photo you want in your auction, and copy and paste the image URL (http) into the Source box, you can then either adjust the width and height of the image there or click ok and adjust it manually in your auction using the dragging technique.
Once you are satisfied with you finished template…scroll back again to the bottom of the page and click on HTML again and right click and copy the entire page. Then off you go to Ebay to start selling…go through the normal methods of selling on ebay but only add the ONE free photo you get, and when you get to the description box you change to HTML and simply paste the entire page you just made on Heaven templates.
You have just made your first professional looking auction, and more often than not your sales will reflect this. I stopped selling for a while on Ebay and so hadn't used HT for some time, and when I started selling again, and used basic Ebay options I found my items didn't sell or didn't sell well…but since using HT again I definitely sell more. Coincidence or not who knows?
Other details Heaven Templates also sells customised designs which if you are interested in having a unique page then you may be interested in. I have had a customised shop logo before for when I had my Ebay shop running…and this was a pretty painless option, Deanna who runs the site, emailed me asking me questions about what I wanted, colours etc…then she played around with designs and emailed me with a copyright version of one to see if I liked it, before sending me the final version. I can't remember how much I paid for this but it wasn't that expensive. (About £5)
All in all I would recommend this site to anyone who sells anything on Ebay…as long as you are prepared to wait as the site can be pretty slow at times but I'm hoping this is a temporary setback and that it will be resolved sometime soon? There is also a contact button where you can make any enquiries you may have. This has a priority button too which is good and I've always found that any enquiries I have had are generally answered quite quickly.
Thank you for reading Michelle Sept07
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