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So last year before she got sick, my fiancee and I trolled through the local thrift stores and bought up a few hundred pieces of clothing, mostly dresses. Now that she’s getting somewhat better and I’ve lost my job, we’re looking at selling all this stuff. And it seems overwhelming. I know a little bit about Microsoft Access, so I thought I’d put together a database and then export the results to eBay’s File Exchange service. While this is not terribly hard for a single category, when you start branching out it becomes overwhelming because each category has different specifics.
TL;DR Does anyone here use File Exchange + Access/Excel, Turbo Lister or any of the third party listing services? How hard was it to set up, and do you actually find that it adds value to your business?
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There are some sellers on this forum that know this process and might be able to explain more. But I seem to remember eBay announcing they were getting rid of this process.
Honestly, if its just a a few hundred pieces of clothing, there’s really no shortcut to just listing one item at a time. If you’re motivated and this is your fulltime job, you can do 20 items in a day.
Listing is the barrier to entry to having an eBay store.
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Yes I have used a CSV flat file to upload listings into eBay. Maybe worth it, but it really depends on whether or not the items your listing have similar attributes. I think clothing would lend itself well to that. By similar attributes I’m thinking primarily of shipping. My recommendation is 2 get those 200 pieces listed manually because you need money now. However it would be worth it spending an hour a day working on gaining understanding of how to use the flat file uploading option through eBay. I used Excel not access. I don’t even know how you would use access to create a CSV file comma but I’m not an access person either so. I have a department within eBay that’s dedicated to helping people do this, and they’re super about providing support around the questions you have when you finally go to upload it. It didn’t take me that long actually to get a file together but at the time that I put the file together it became clear to me that the items really needed to have some similarities in order to be worthwhile. Good luck
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Exporting a CSV from Access is fairly easy, but one thing has me stumped. According to the File Exchange instructions, eBay wants the Description field in HTML. I have no clue how to write HTML. Do you remember how you got around that? Did you just type in plain text, or did you manually enter in the HTML code into an Excel cell?
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Not sure how much time it would save versus creating a template or simply hitting sell similar. Writing all of the information down in access just to convert it and upload, wait for incompleted listing to populate and then add pictures and finishing touches. Its only a few steps removed from just listing it the simple way.
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I’ve been trying fruitlessly to post an image of what I’ve been working on. I’ll try one last time:
This allows you to select brand, shipping policy, material, color, etc. from drop downs (or typing in the first few letters) saving a lot of typing in the Excel templates. The other thing this form does is let you procedureally generate the title and description (the most time consuming part of listing for us) from the color, brand, measurements, etc.
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Hi, I haven’t replied for some time, but I see you edited your post 2 weeks ago, so I assume you’re still looking for an answer. I do not think you need to use html to upload the photo, but you do need a URL address. I know that the department that supports this process at eBay is very adept at addressing concerns, as they are a technical customer support group. So, you should rely on them as your first resource. They are very knowledgeable.
The entire process was really slick for me, except when it came to the picture URL piece. That’s what dragged it down for me. I have a question for you: where are you hosting your images? Ideally, there would be a URL that one could simply change out the endings on, say with a concatenate function in Excel.
I’d love to here how it’s going for you.
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