Using templates and background images
On eBay, “Best Match” is the primary way that users find your listings. The higher quality your listing, the more likely it is to rank highly in the “Best Match” results.
Two big factors in eBay’s algorithm are click-through rate—the percentage of people who see your item and click-through to the listing to learn more—and the average time a user spends viewing your listing.
Images and titles and critical for improving your click-through rate, and quality photos and descriptions similarly are critical for increasing the average time spent viewing your listing.
To help with that, whuppit lets you define templates for your eBay titles and descriptions, and lets you provide a standard background image for your listing photos.
Using Title & Description Templates
whuppit listing templates let you create default titles and descriptions, using data whuppit knows about your card already, to kick-start all your listings. You can setup these saved templates in your eBay settings in your whuppit account.
Placeholders for substitution
Each template uses special substitutions for card details. For example, ${name} will be replaced with the card’s name. Here’s a full list of the substitutions currently available for both titles and descriptions:
Placeholder | Value to be Substituted | Example |
{name} | Card name | Bowman's Best U |
{player} | Player name | DJ Lagway |
{year} | Card year | 2024 |
{parallel} | Parallel/Variety if applicable | Blue refractor |
{number} | Card number | 88 |
{gradingCompany} | Grading company, if applicable | PSA |
{gradingGrade} | Grade of the card, if applicable | 10 |
{printRun} | Print run of the card, if applicable, prefixed by ‘/’ | /100 |
For example, given the following title template:
{player} {year} {name} {number} {parallel} {printRun} {gradingCompany} {gradingGrade}
An example listing title might be:
“DJ Lagway 2024 Bowman's Best U Blue Refractor #88 /149 PSA 10”
Setting your templates
To set your templates, navigate to the eBay settings in your whuppit account and scroll to the Listing Templates section.
You can enter your default title and description templates in the appropriate fields. For the description field, you can also apply some simple formatting such as:
- Making text bold
- Making text italic
- Making text underlined
- Inserting links
Adjusting your templates for individual listings
When you create a listing in whuppit, you’ll be taken to a screen where your pre-defined title and description templates will be applied, with any placeholders substituted with the appropriate information. At this point, you can adjust your description and title for that listing to fine-tune and add or remove any information that may not be applicable.
eBay restricts listing titles to 80 characters, and whuppit will show you a counter to let you see how many characters you’ve used. It’s entirely possible that once placeholder’s have been applied, you may exceed the 80 character limit and need to adjust accordingly.
Using Background Images
Quality images are one of the best ways to stand out in eBay’s listings. For each listing you create, whuppit will create three images:
- An image of the front of the card
- An image of the back of the card
- An image of the front and back side by side
The default images are already a great step—the slab photos are large and clear and have a nice drop shadow layered on top of a white background.
You can make your images stand-out even more by providing a saved background that whuppit can use instead of the plain white background.
Setting your saved background
To set a saved background, first go to your eBay settings and scroll to the Standard Background Image section.
For best results, it’s recommended to provide a square image that is 1500px by 1500px in size.
Unsplash is a fantastic source of free photos, textures and patterns that you could either use as is for your background, or use as a starting point for creating one.
You can either click “Choose File” and then find the image you want to use as your background, or drag the image itself onto the field. Then click “Upload and Save Background Image”. The page will reload and you should see a small thumbnail of the background image you have set.
At this point you’re all set—whuppit will now layer all card photos on top of this background when creating your listing images.
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