Guide

How long can an eBay title be?

80 characters. That is a little over half what Etsy gives you, and it is the single biggest reason an eBay listing cannot be an Etsy listing with the end cut off. Eighty characters is about ten words. Every one of them has to be doing work.

eBay has no tag field at all

This is the difference that catches people moving over from Etsy. There is no box for thirteen keywords. Your search terms have exactly two places to live: the title, and the item specifics. A keyword that is in neither does not exist as far as eBay's search is concerned.

Which means the title is carrying a job that on Etsy is split across two fields, in half the space. Hence the eighty characters mattering so much.

Item specifics are the other half of your keywords

Item specifics are the structured attributes on the listing: brand, material, colour, size, style. Buyers filter by them in the left hand sidebar, and eBay reads them when it decides what your listing matches. Leaving them blank does not just look unfinished, it removes you from the filtered searches where the buyer has already decided what they want.

Most of them come straight off your own spreadsheet. If you track colour and material for your own purposes, that is an item specific each, and you already have it.

The shape that works in eighty characters

The first one is 79 characters and says almost nothing. Beautiful, unique and perfect are words nobody searches for. The second is 78 and carries the item, the material, the colour, the size and three phrasings a buyer might actually type.

Lead with what the thing is. Then brand, material, colour, size. Skip the adjectives that describe your opinion of it.

Bulk listing on eBay means File Exchange

eBay's bulk tool is File Exchange, and it reads a CSV. It is stricter than Shopify's importer in a way worth knowing before you build a file: three of its columns cannot be filled by anybody but you.

So any tool that hands you a finished eBay file without asking you those three things is guessing at them. Download the template from File Exchange, paste your rows into it, fill those columns, upload that.

How this compares to the others

eBay is the tightest of the four on titles and the only one with no tag field. There is a table of all four side by side, and pages on Etsy titles, Shopify product imports and Amazon search terms.

listWright writes eBay titles to eighty characters rather than cutting them down to eighty, and fills item specifics from the columns you already keep. Checking listings you already have is free.

eBay changes its tooling from time to time. This page describes how things stood when it was written, and eBay's own seller help will say so before ours does.