I'm a buyer, and the following two issues strongly affect whether I will buy from a seller. Most buyers won't wait for the page to load
or scroll horizontally (unless the item in question is impossibly rare and they can't obtain it from any other source). Since one of the rules of selling is to entice buyers to buy from YOU and not from other sellers, designing your listing with these points in mind may very well make the difference between a sale and a "failed to sell" email.
No-no #1: Sellers, please don't use a template design that stretches beyond the width of some monitors, resulting in a horizontal scroll bar.
Example. This occurs as a result of
- using absolute widths (e.g. 900px) for a div or a table or cell,
- using images in your design that have an inherent width which will stretch your design, or
- including badly written code that results in a stretched design.
The sellers who make this error have no idea how annoying it is... and possibly they don't even know it's occurring. Their ignorance of the appearance of their listings may be a result of their own monitors being reasonably wide.
Points to consider:
- When you're designing a listing, design it for people whose system is LESS advanced than yours. Don't assume that everyone has a wide monitor or a large monitor;
- Don't assume that every visitor to your listing will use the same browser as you. Test how your listing looks in various browsers - preferably in IE, Microsoft, Chrome, Opera and Safari. (At the very least - IE and Firefox.)
- Don't bother with exotic font families in your html, because if someone doesn't have that font installed, you've wasted your time. It might look fabulous on your own computer, but you're selling to the world. Stick to the fonts that the majority of users have on their computers.
No-no #2: Sellers, please resist the temptation to use huge images and lots of them in your listing. Do you know how slowly your listing will load on the average setup for Australian buyers? Even something like this
example is quite slow to load. The slowness of images and other media to load means that you have GOT to optimise your media. It's not just a matter of image size - it's a matter of FILE SIZE. Thus, please...
- think about making your image no more than 560 by 410 pixels in image size,
- since a computer screen is limited to about 72 to 92 dots per inch of resolution, don't upload an image that is overkill in terms of resolution;
- since by compressing an image by as much as 50% may still result in a very clear image, please don't used uncompressed images. Keep the file size (if you can) to 50k for your largest images if you're going to have more than one image, and don't have more than 2 of them (because even if you limit it to two images at that file size, that's still going to be slow for a user on dial-up); and
- in fact, why not think about using thumbnails on your listing? Each thumbnail can link to a larger image when the potential buyer clicks onto the image (include text such as "Click onto image for full-size photo").
Sometimes sellers honestly don't realise how long their listings take to load. This may be due to a number of factors:
- The seller has fast broadband, and doesn't realise how much slower most Australian broadband may be, let alone the crawl of dial-up;
- The seller's images load fast for him because they are cached (duh), and the seller doesn't seem to understand that first-time visitors to his listing will NOT have those images cached;
- The seller is under the deluded impression that potential buyers will want to see all of those gorgeous images, without realising that many potential buyers won't even be able to get the page to load. In other words, a compromise has to be found between offering lots of gorgeous images and enabling the average visitor to see the page loading in less than 10 seconds. Fewer images, compressed images, using thumbnails - these are some of the ways in which to offer quality without making a page spasm with file size overload.
| Physical Size | Width x Height | File Size |
| Extremely Large | 1200 x 900 | 80k to 100k |
| Very Large | 800 x 600 | 60k to 80k |
| Large | 640 x 480 | 50k to 60k |
| Medium to Large | 400 x ??? | 25k to 50k |
| Small to Medium | 300 x ??? | 10k to 25k |
