How to Add Video to Your eBay Listings the Right Way

Once upon a time, you could add YouTube videos to eBay listings, but not anymore.

If you try to add a YouTube video through copy and paste of the YouTube embed code, it won’t work.

But it’s not because eBay doesn’t want or allow video. It has to do with them not allowing certain types of code on their pages (iframes, which is what YouTube uses).

Why Would You Want Video in Your Product Listing?

Ever been shopping online, purchased something, and then been disappointed because what you got was small, or bigger, or a different color, etc., from what the pictures made it look like?

That’s something you don’t want your buyers to experience.

Videos can also help you sell more of your product.

That’s a nice benefit too.

A Simple Video Can Pay Off Big Time

Your video doesn’t have to be complicated, and you don’t have to be the one to demo your product, unless you want to be famous, of course. ;)

Your video could be a quick slide show of your product with some upbeat music.

Your video could be of your product in use, or highlighting the various things your product does well and the main benefits of it.

It could even be a few titles introducing the features and benefits of the product and then ending with a nice picture.

Don’t think it’s got to be something huge. A lot of shoppers skim text, but with the right soundtrack, they’ll keep watching a quickly paced video.

The more time your visitor stays on your listing page, the more likely they are to buy.

How Do You Embed Video in an eBay Listing?

eBay has made it clear that it is possible to do so, and it’s almost as easy as copy and paste (almost).

We’ll show you how.

eBay has specified that they allow video in product listings, but it requires HTML5, and they’re “working on providing compatibility for popular video hosting sites.”

Until then, this is how you embed video in an eBay listing using HTML5 (the newest way to embed videos).

<video controls="controls" width="320" height="240" autoplay> <source src="https://yourhostingsite.com/movie.mp4" type="video/mp4"> </video>

The code above will display your movie at 320 x 240 pixels (regardless of the actual size of the movie).

The source indicates where the video is located, such as https://yourhostingsite.com/movie.mp4. You’ll need a full web address (URL) as your source for your video to display.

Replace “yourhostingsite” with your own hosting address, and replace movie.mp4 with your video’s file name.

The autoplay attribute makes the video play automatically.

But maybe you don’t want your video to autoplay (annoying). Just remove autoplay and keep controls instead.

Since the video won’t be autoplaying, you may want to choose what gets displayed on the first paused frame of your video. It’s called a poster. If you’ve got an image or screenshot from your video that shows off what your video is about, use the poster attribute.

<video width="640" height="360" poster="https://yoursite.com/photothumbnail.jpg" controls> <source src="https://yoursite.com/yourvideo.mp4" type="video/mp4" /> </video>

Where Should You Host the Video for Your eBay Listing?

Your video has to be located somewhere. That could be your own webserver, but what if you don’t have one for your domain?

You might not want to use it even if you do, because it’ll likely make your video load really slowly.

One of the fastest ways is to use a cloud service like Amazon S3 Hosting or Google Cloud Hosting. Getting started with those is well beyond the scope of this article. If you find that hosting the video on your own server makes it load too slowly, try those services.

These are hosting services that can deliver your content fast. Think of it like Dropbox. You create a folder, drop your video file in there, and use the link to the file in your code for the video.

They charge based on usage, so keep an eye on the costs.