WP Lab

Thank you for your feedback, @youngeshi.

If you could tell me more about the improvements that would make WP-Lister easier to use, I would gladly hear your suggestions. WP-Lister for eBay already has a setup assistant which should guide you through the initial setup procedure, but I’m sure there is always room for improvement.

What I don’t understand though is why you would say there is “no documentation so far”, when there is both an extensive manual on https://www.wplab.com/plugins/wp-lister/documentation/ – explaining every feature and option from first time setup over profile creation to the process of listing items on eBay – as well as a searchable knowledge base with answers to over a hundred FAQs at https://docs.wplab.com/.

I suppose you could blame some of those docs to be complicated or outdated, but to say they don’t exist at all makes me wonder where exactly you were looking for documentation.

There might not be much actual documentation within WP-Lister itself, but even in the plugin you will find a “Tutorial” page in the main menu, with a brief explanation on listing items to eBay, as well as links to the pages above and more. So even if you never left WordPress and WP-Lister, you should have found both the manual / documentation as well as the knowledge base / FAQ.

That’s why I’d really like to hear how we could possibly improve the documentation on WP-Lister for eBay.

Or could it be possible that you were talking about the Amazon version? That I could understand, we released version 1.0 only recently and there is still a lot of work to do regarding documentation, there is no setup assistant yet (didn’t exist in 1.0 of the ebay version either), no screencasts yet, and it’s generally even more complex, especially at first. So maybe you posted your review under the wrong plugin?

Let me know, I’m here to help.

kind regards,
Matt

Yes, that exact line is included in the readme already, so I suppose it should work then.

Hm, we only have that one version, we don’t differ between development and stable version, but it doesn’t look to me as if this should be a problem.

When I compare these two links you sent, I also notice it says “The language pack for the plugin will be generated when 95% of the Development (trunk) sub-project strings have been translated (currently 16%).”, so it seems to accept the “Development (trunk)” subproject as the default one, or am I wrong here?

Let me know what you need me to do, if there is anything, but to me it seems to be working.

kind regards,
Matt

Hey David,

I just released updated versions for both the eBay and Amazon version of WP-Lister, and after some initial hiccups now both should show up as translatable here on www.ads-software.com.

Please let us know if you have any more suggestions or if I missed something that should be improved regarding the translations. Thanks!

kind regards,
Matt

I released version 0.9.23 just now, so please go ahead and give that new version a try. Ideally you might not have to lower the setting from its default value at all, since running in batches should already use less resources than before, but if it still doesn’t work out of the box with the new version then please follow John’s instructions to decrease the batch size and let us know what setting ended up working for you.

kind regards,
Matt

For the record, the next update (version 2.1.2) will check automatically if the site specific eBay data was loaded successfully, and if not it will show a warning message on the top of the profile page, asking the user to do so now.

kind regards,
Matt

I agree that our documentation could be better – and will become better once we’ve released version 1.0 of WP-Lister for Amazon – but you should really give our support a second chance, as this was clearly a misunderstanding.

Your question was this:

We are trying to create some layouts for exporting to eBay, but the formatting (CSS) seems to be stripped out or we are not passing it in the correct way. (fonts, columns using float, centring videos etc.) These elements are all in the main description

Could you tell us if it is possible to format HTML set to eBay? And if it is could you tell us where the css should go? And if possible send us an example template that uses formatting.

Unfortunately John, who is an eBay seller himself, but not a web developer (nor does he know much about CSS and HTML) apparently only really understood the first part about “creating some layouts for ebay” followed by “CSS” and “HTML”, which triggered the default response about custom template design work (which we’d love to offer, but simply don’t have the ressources for). That’s why his reply was:

While we pride ourselves on helping our customers as best as we can, we don’t offer support for design, so I don’t have any other sample listing templates, other than what comes with WP-Lister out of the box.

In regards to customizing the look on eBay, you would use the “Templates” page of WP-Lister to modify the look of your listing descriptions/template on eBay. On the “Templates” page you will see a “Stylesheet” section where you can modify the styling of your listing template on eBay. I would recommend not using CSS within the descriptions of your listings in Woocommerce, but instead use your theme to modify the look for your WC site, and then use the “Stylesheet” section of the listing template to modify the look on eBay.

If you had asked John anything about selling on eBay, or how do something with WP-Lister that’s not covered in the docs, he’d certainly given you a useful answer. But your question was in fact more bug report than question, but it wasn’t understood as such. (Not that there is something wrong with it, I did understand what you mean, but I’m a developer myself, not an eBay seller.)

Anyway, first things first: I checked the code whether there was anything that would strip certain HTML code, or filter the product description in any way. Assuming that we’re talking about the product_content shortcode (in double brackets), then how WP-Lister processed the product description depends on the Shortcode processing option which can be found on the advanced settings page.

Have your tried to play with that option? I’d suggest to set it to “off”, which will bypass every kind of filter that’s applied to the product description before it’s inserted into the listing template – all except the wpautop() filter, which is required for paragraphs.

If you’re still seeing certain HTML tags or inline CSS being removed, then I can assure you that it’s not WP-Lister doing so. I’d gladly investigate this further, for example on a staging site, but before that you should send me an example of a product description before and after (the HTML in WooCommerce, and what is sent to eBay).

Last not least, I have to remind you that we have a simple “no questions asked” refund policy, so if you decide that WP-Lister is not for you, you’ll receive a full refund within 30 days after your purchase. That’s another reason why we are really motivated to support you as good as we possibly can – even if your first impression didn’t reflect that.

kind regards,
Matt

P.S: I did check whether there is any other email from that email address in our helpdesk system (HelpScout) and there is not. No idea what went wrong there, but if you had used the support form on wplab.com then there really should be a record of that message in HelpScout, that system has never failed us in over five years. Also, we try to answer every single email/request within 24 hours during weekdays, so if you didn’t get a reply within that time your email probably didn’t reach us.

I’m going to close this ticket (mark as resolved) as there was been no new message for over a week, so I can only assume it has been resolved.

If you encounter any more issues like this, I’d suggest you use the support form on wplab.com right away as this type of issue is usually related to your specific server setup.

kind regards,
Matt

Sorry for the delay, but this should be fixed in version 0.9.21 which should not show that warning for 13 digit EANs with a leading zero anymore.

kind regards,
Matt

That sounds very much as if you tried this on a previous version, before 0.9.20 which introduced a manual marketplace selector, while 0.9.19 tried to guess the marketplace from the filename, which didn’t work reliably – as you noticed.

Besides that there were other issues with the custom feed template upload option, so you should really update to 0.9.21 and give it another try.

If it still doesn’t work, please send us a message at https://www.wplab.com/request-support/ where you include the template file you’re trying to upload, and a link to this conversation on the forum as a quick reference.

kind regards,
Matt

Thanks, this is all great news, but from what I can see it basically saying that you should generate and download custom feed templates from seller central, which you can do for all kinds of categories, not just handmade.

It looks like I don’t have access to these categories (nor the instructions pages), but you shouldn’t find any problem following these instructions to download your custom feed template(s).

Instead of editing in in Excel and re-uploading it yourself to seller central, you would then upload that custom feed template into WP-Lister itself and it will work just like any other category specific feed template.

Just make sure that you are on the latest version (0.9.20 or better) as we recently fixed some remaining issue regarding that upload option.

kind regards,

Matt

I’ll mark this as resolves, as version 0.9.20, released yesterday, includes detailed instructions on how to update all templates and remove all outdated ones.

kind regards,

Matt

That’s very interesting to know, but for some reason I can’t open these two links.

I made sure I’m logged in to Seller Central Europe with an account that has access to all EU marketplaces, and I tried setting the language before to both english and german, but whatever I try, all I get is the error message

“There was an error displaying this topic.”

(“Fehler beim Anzeigen dieses Themas.” in german)

Not that I had seen this ever before, but maybe you need some kind of registration before you can access Amazon Handmade? But it doesn’t make much sense to restrict even the documentation like this.

I’d suggest you open a support ticket on our website where you include a link to this topic here and ask for Matt, so we can look into this together.

kind regards,

Matt

You’re welcome, ck1984, I’m glad it’s working now!

kind regards,

Matt

What I wrote regarding a 404 error at https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/404-error-329/ also applies to a 403 error (which is one of the errors you often see when ModSecurity is involved):

It could be some security system from your web host which disallows certain content to be posted/sent to the server. When you save a template, you send HTML and PHP code to the server, which might trigger some ModSecurity rules or a similar system.

If your hoster isn’t able to fix this for you, you can still edit the template files directly via SFTP (as web designers are used to anyway) or move to another hoster.

kind regards,

Matt