Welcome and thanks for joining us today!

We love workshops to be interactive, so please feel free to ask your questions that directly relate to this topic.

Added note: If you click on the "Watch this discussion" link, you will receive an email each time someone posts to the workshop.

Stop Watching: If at any time you no longer want to receive updates on a thread you are watching, just click on the link titled "Stop Watching Thread" found in the specific thread being watched. Also you can remove any watched thread by clicking on the "Watched Discussions" link located in the log in bar and deleting the watched thread.

If you're new to the discussion boards, please be sure to check out the board tutorial:

Link

A from our Legal Department: The statements and opinions made in this discussion board are those of the workshop host only and do not reflect eBay policy or eBay's opinion with respect to such statements.


Cheers,

Deirdre
eBay Community Development

Item Templates are stored in the Create Items window:

Let's examine what Item Templates are:

An Item Template is a record which holds the default data for all or
a group of items you typically list.

If you, for example, sell postcards, antique jewelry and autographed
baseballs, you may very well want to create 3 Item Templates, as each
item within each of those groups will share much of the same information.
I have 2 main Item Templates I generally use: one for my own items I list,
as the are usually the same size and I start them at the same price -
and - another for creating item records for my main consignment client,
as I don't want to have to enter consignment info for each of her items
I list.

I will use a fictitious seller, Frank, as the seller of postcards, antique
jewelry & autographed baseballs as a sample for this workshop. Frank
will want 3 separate Item Templates, 1 for each of his category of products.
For example, he lists the majority of his postcards in his eBay store,
sells most at $14.99, ships them via first class mail at $1.50, usually
lists in the National Parks postcard category, uses his store category
"Collectibles - Paper", uses his Postcards Ad Template and uses
a gallery photo for each. He will also set his Shipping To/From and Payment
presets as appropriate. Thus, he creates an Item Template which has those
fields filled in:

eBay Certified Stores Designer. Click to see
my ME page for links to Blackthorne Pro workshops & FREE templates.

I've mentioned Presets. These, too, are quite useful in speeding up your
listing process. You may have set some of these up the first time you
ran Blackthorne. They are found under Tools>Options as seen in the
image below (The most commonly-used tem-related presets are highlighted.).
The more time you spend once ahead of time creating your necessary presets,
the less time you'll have to take when creating item records to submit
to eBay.

Since I began selling on eBay long before the shipping calculator was
a feature, I developed my own chart of prices I'd charge to send packages
of various weights and sizes. When I first started using Blackthorne,
I used my chart as a guide in creating my shipping presets - for example,
my shipping preset "PR 1#" lists a flat shipping rate for items
weighing up to 1 pound that I ship via priority mail. "UPS 8#"
is my flat rate for shipping an 8 pound package via UPS Ground. I've since
added some calculated shipping presets which allow me pick my carrier
& shipping method and eBay provides buyers the rates based on that
plus the weight and dimensions I add to the item record.

eBay Certified Stores Designer. Click to see
my ME page for links to Blackthorne Pro workshops & FREE templates.

Or, a very easy way to add a new preset for shipping, for example: Click
the drop-down arrow & select < Custom > and click the Edit button
to its right..

That opens the window below to which you enter your information. Unless
you're certain you'll never need to use that shipping preset again, check
the box to Create Preset based on these settings. When you then click
OK in this window, you'll be asked to name that new preset.

eBay Certified Stores Designer. Click to see
my ME page for links to Blackthorne Pro workshops & FREE templates.

I love the idea of using presets for items I sell all the time. I never new we had all of these options. Thank you for bringing these up.

I have noticed that sometimes on old listings for items I sell all the time that when I go to upload from an older listing the photo's won't upload properly. what cause that?

Entering your
photos can be sped up. Rather than clicking on each item well and picking
each photo one-by-one, you can open a Windows Explorer window to your
photos folder as shown below. In Blackthorne, I have the appropriate item
record open, then I pull the Windows Explorer window to the top. Select
the photos in REVERSE order (last one will go into first picture slot)
and drag into the first picture well. You'll see a small plus sign in
a box next to your cursor when you're above the picture well. In the image
below, I clicked on each picture in order with the Food image last as
for this sample, I wanted that to be my gallery image, thus in the first
picture well.

eBay Certified Stores Designer. Click to see
my ME page for links to Blackthorne Pro workshops & FREE templates.

minniealdinger, if the picture is still on your computer, try browsing for it again

Teresa (Moonlady)