eBay Listing HTML Errors Add Odd Characters To Item Titles
eBay sellers are reporting their listing titles are suddenly being turned into "junk" due to HTML coding error not properly rendering certain characters or punctuation marks.
The problem was reported in multiple threads in the eBay community forum today and appears to be an issue with how eBay is display characters like apostrophes, single and double quotes, and ampersands, which are often used to save precious limited text space in the title or to communicate size measurements.
"Junk" in titles
Hi, It seems as if there is lots of excess "Junk Writings" in my titles. - anyone?... I am seeing that everywhere there is a " or a ' it is followed by a #39 or & #34 - only in title.
This is not a problem on your end and I wouldn't waste time revising listings.
I checked my own account for an item with & in the title (it's part of the brand name) and when I look at the item page it shows the HTML code instead of the & symbol.
The problem appears to be a global issue as sellers in the UK also asked about it during their weekly chat with eBay staff.
Display Error with Listing Titles
Apologies for highlighting further errors, but just spotted today, in the website version of eBay UK, if you click to view a listing, the title is displayed with random characters.
I have tried two different browsers on my laptop and one on my mobile and the same error occurs. Have cleared the cache and rebooted the devices. Not sure if anyone else is seeing this issue? Error does not occur in the app.
Marco@eBay responded:
Thanks for flagging this with us. We're aware of this, this is confirmed as a technical issue from our end, so I will add your account as one of the impacted accounts, so that can be resolved as soon as possible for you.👍
And back in the US community forum, Kyle@eBay provided a ticket number for affected sellers to use when reporting the issue to customer service.
I found that this is an alert that was opened early this morning ALERT15960
That alert has also been added to the Ongoing Technical Issues thread in the community as well.
A similar issue impacted variation listings back in March, causing the drop down menu where buyers can select product options to display the same coding errors for those symbols.
Liz Morton
Sellers who are seeing this issue in their titles are encouraged to click the question mark in the bottom right on the screen and use the pop up option to report a technical issue - typically, the more reports eBay receives, the higher priority an issue will be to fix.
Are you seeing apostrophes, quotation marks, ampersands and other symbols displaying improperly on your eBay listings? Let us know in the comments below!
