vivmedia.net

Don’t Miss the eBay Store Referral Credit

Mike Viv — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:38:12 +0000

Ok…maybe you seasoned e-Bayer’s already know this stuff. It’s our first foray into eBay and we almost missed it on our first pass. If you’re linking to your eBay site from off-site, make sure you include the parameter “refid=store” in your link. If the visit converts to a sale, you will currently save 75% of eBay final charges.

Other things to keep in mind:

Make your store main page name memorable and encourage return visitors to use it. Invite them to bookmark it. Visits to your store directly via the URL (stores.ebay.com/your-store) either typed in by the customer, or from a Favorites link in the browser, also get the referral credit. There is no need to append the refid.
Use your store main page URL in any printed advertising, as again, if customers use this, you get the credit.
In e-mail solicitations, do include the “refid=store” link at the end of your URL in order to receive the credit.

That’s it for now.

Say “Yes” to CSS — on eBay!

Mike Viv — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:48:14 +0000

Ok…so we all know the advantage of CSS. Right? Well…judging from the wealth of both legacy and newer HTML out there that gives lip service to CSS but sort of misses the point (if your a true CSS fan, you know what we mean)…maybe not everybody fully appreciates the advantages. Not yet. But that’s not the point of this article (maybe we’ll write another on that topic one day).

The point is, if you do CSS, and then you find you need to do eBay, you’re going to want to do CSS on eBay. But how do you do it?

Current methods for putting your own HTML on eBay involve writing snippets of HTML that go into various places within the body of the page, between the … tags. And herein lies the problem. You cannot, in a standards-compliant way, add your tag outside the element of your HTML page.

You can find several recommendations on the web, and each has its place.

First: Some recommend placing the tag in your HTML snippet anyway. It generally works…at least in many browsers. But, as we pointed out, it’s not standards-compliant, and if it doesn’t break today, it’s very likely to break tomorrow. Period. We don’t recommend it.

Second: Embed your CSS in your elements. For small stuff, this is probably livable, but we say, defeats the purpose. What we want is to place our CSS on an external site, and reference it from eBay. That way, we can make style changes and even graphics changes to our eBay pages without ever having to log into eBay! We won’t get this by embedding CSS within the HTML tags.

Third: Credit for the concept goes to the Geek Daily blog. We really should have realized this one ourselves! But as is so often the case…we didn’t. So thanks, guys!

The very simple solution is to use JavaScript to dynamically add the

tag into the element at runtime. It takes only five lines of JavaScript, and these lines can go anywhere within the body of your HTML:This works in every browser we’ve tested, and you’re good to go. Standards-compliant CSS on eBay.

Now…one other thing to watch out for…it looks as though eBay pages render in “quirks” mode. (Has nobody told the eBay developers about DOCTYPEs??) Anyway, until they catch up, you’ll have to watch out for that, and either avoid or workaround the related problems that can raise.

Side Note: evidently if you use tags in IE (not the best idea, we say, but we won’t debate you on it here), there are issues with dynamically assigning a stylsheet reference to the HTML in the iframe; and that’s what the Geek Daily guys were really talking about. For the full article, including a possible solution to that issue, see the Geek Daily blog entry.

A “Thank You” to the Community At Large

Mike Viv — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:55:37 +0000

Welcome to Viv Media’s informal, stream-of-consciousness, random topic-of-the-moment blog. We’re a small, but fiercely determined web, graphics and software development company. We’ve been in the software business in one shape or form or another for nearly twenty-five years. Web development and design ventures are somewhat newer, and started as something “on the side” for a number of years, with serious commercial activity beginning in 2006.

Our projects are generally private deals, hand-selected, and we’re not advertising our services commercially here (or anywhere else) at this stage. However, in the course of our efforts, especially over the last two years, it has become abundantly apparent that the web itself, besides becoming our chosen medium of expression — and livlihood – has also become an indispensible resource in doing our jobs. Through the efforts of others before us who decided to contribute bits and pieces of their expertise to the wordlwide community, often via simple forums just such as this, countless hours have been saved by finding a needed technique…a solution…an idea…put up by someone else, just like us, who scratched their heads looking for an answer to a similar problem, or the same one…and then found it…and went one step further and decided to share. Even a mere nudge in the right direction that can come from someone else’s experience is sometimes of inestimable value.

Sure, you can…and should…buy books. But frequently the most up-to-date answers to problems we face, in HTML/DHTML, CSS, JavaScript, Cross-Browser issues, SQL, XML, Scripting languages like PHP, PERL, Python, Graphics editing and design and more, are found not in any book, but right here on the web, contributed by someone else, just like us, who in the course of doing their own work also decided to give something back to this community.

And so this blog is something of the answer to two nagging problems:

(1) What should a small web company doing private projects and joint ventures put on its own web site?

(2) What is a good way to gather together the growing collection of tips and tricks that really work; nasty “gotcha’s” that everybody seems to forget at least once; and other sanity-preserving pieces of collective knowledge and information; and at the same time give thanks and credit to those who have come along before us and been willing to share?

The answer presented itself in the form of this blog. As our own way of saying “Thank you,” and also trying to give something back to the online community that has certainly helped us along, rather than merely scribbling newly-found tips, tricks and workarounds into a journal, or typing them into another local file that we may or may not even remember to look at ourselves three months from now, we’re going to start mentioning them here. When we find something that works, and works well, we’ll mention it here and give credit where credit is due.

So if you’ve stumbled across us, and find anything useful here, do take a moment to let us know. And if you have anything you’d like to share, by all means, let us have your comments.