Basically you don’t
need expensive HTML editors anymore. The list of commercially
available HTML editors software is endless – and the price tags
are enormous. Most people don’t want to spend a lot of money to
get started with their eBay business. Fair enough, since the
goal is to make money and not to spend money. So it makes
perfect sense to use a program to design auction listings which
is available for free. And such a program is Netscape Composer.

It has the same professional features like FrontPage or any
other similar program. To design stunning and professional
looking eBay auction sites with Netscape Composer you need to
download Netscape first. If you start up the program, select
File->New Composer Page and basically you can start immediately
to design your auction listings. You can make you letters in any
colour, bold, italics, use background colours (or even images)
etc. The options are endless. You can save this file on your
local hard drive as html file. I used to have one file for
every listing I generate. The best thing is that once you have
got a nice and professional looking eBay auction listing, you
can use it for ever. Just open your last listing in Netscape
Composer and edit according to your new item. Amazingly, this
takes only a couple of minutes.

But how do you transfer your listing saved as a html file on
your local hard drive to eBay? The answer is simple. Once you
have logged in into your eBay account and selected your
category and starting price you have to type in your “item
description”. Did you see that eBay allows HTML format? Have a
look when you launch your next listing. That’s the time where
you go back to your new listing you just have created with
Netscape Composer. Down the bottom of your Netscape Composer
page you’ll see a button called: SOURCE - the source code of
your listing. Click on that and highlight and copy the entire
text. Select then the eBay site and paste this text into the
“Item description box”. Make sure that all links are working
and that all photos are uploaded to the internet.

When you have finalised your listing you will be surprised. A
stunning and professional looking “DIY-listing”. You can always
use “ready-to-go” auction templates and edit these according to
your item. You’ll see that with an professional auction design
you can easily attract more buyers and get higher bids. It’s
worth the effort. Keep in mind that professional web design
software is highly expensive and does the same job.
Alternatively, you can choose from a huge variety of third
party auction services doing the job for you. But hey, there
are incredibly expensive too. Don’t you think that the eBay
fees are high enough and you can easily do it yourself without
spending any additional dollars. It’s really simple!

About the Author: Thomas Haselhorst is webmaster of
http://www.auction-design-for-free