eBay HTML Updates Break Listing Descriptions With Unwanted Bold Font & Other Changes
eBay users are frustrated with a recent update to listing page description coding that is inserting or ignoring HTML code for bold fonts, line breaks, and more.
The problem is being discussed in the eBay community forum, with users saying it appears to be impacting their new listings and they are unable to fix the issue themselves through HTML editing options eBay provides in the listing form.
eBay randomly inserting into my listing descriptions after saving
I can't get rid of the things. When I edit the listing and fix it, once I save it's inserted again at random points in the listing description. I tried creating a different listing description from scratch and it still did it. I have stuff to get done today and this is frustrating the hell out of me.
Similar issue, text formatting keeps getting removed when saving or listing, ie. spacing, boldness keeps changing.
I tried removing everything and starting fresh, but go to list an item and its all jumbled up again. Giving up for the day.
Same think here. Also </ l> </ p> is having some issues as well as
. Despite reformatting manually several times, the changes keep reverting back to complete formatting mess.
One user said they believe the issue may be a simple matter of eBay doing a bulk edit of some of the html and replacing some coding in error.
I'm guessing the tech team is aware of this, but I believe this is the logic that's causing the issue:
They are converting the "b" in "br" tags (i.e. line breaks) to "strong". So "br" becomes "strongr". My guess is they were trying to do an accessibility update to convert "b" tags to "strong" tags, and configured it so that any "b" in an HTML tag gets converted.
Seems like the type of thing that should have been caught before pushing it to production
Others pointed out it's not just inserting the HTML for bold text, it's breaking other parts of the code as well.
the bold text is only the MINOR issue in the problem - it is ignoring standard html tags like line breaks and paragraph tags, inserting tag hundreds of times, changing and adding font tags just as much as well as
tags - it's a complete and utter mess and worse you clean the html up go out of html mode, just inserts all that junk again - it's UNFIXABLE by users - ebay needs to fix this - ASAP!
eBay community staff replied to confirm this is a known issue currently being worked on and provided an alert number for users to reference when contacting support.
Thank you for sharing. I did confirm that there is a ticket open for description texts being automatically changing to bold letters. The ticket is ALERT15856 and is being worked for a resolution.
Users saw similar HTML errors crop up in variation listing drop down menus earlier this month, raising questions about why eBay may be toying with the basic coding and design of the view item listing page.
Liz Morton
Are your eBay listings being impacted by this HTML error? Let us know in the comments below!
