When selling online, the only way that your customer can see your product is by viewing pictures of the item on the web page. This is especially true for eBay® auctions. When you create an eBay listing using eBay's basic online form, your auction page has a blank white background and you are only allowed to use one photo of your product. If you wish to use more photos, you must pay an additional fee. However, your item has a better chance of selling if you use several pictures with different views. Also, by adding a few web graphics, you can add much to the impact of our auction listing. So what do you do if you are a small business and you want to keep the cost of selling on eBay to a minimum? Many use a customized auction template. These templates are very popular and can be found all over the web. With these templates, you have the option to add as many photos as you wish without any additional eBay fees. Also, the template comes with its own set of graphics and a logo customized with your company name. In this tutorial, we will take a look at a few decisions that you need to make when using eBay auction templates.

How Much is Too Much
One limitation that you must consider is the size and number of photos. Using too many photos or photos that are too large can cause your listing page to download slowly into the web browser. You run the risk of losing your customer. Besides these photos, you will also have a company logo and the other graphics needed for the template which will add to the total size of your web page. Therefore, keep these points in mind when you are choosing your product photos and deciding on how many to use. Your next step will be to decide where you wish to host these graphics and photos for your auction template.

Hosting Options
Now that you have all the images for your eBay listing, it is time to host these graphics and photos on the web. The best way to do this is to host your photos and graphics yourself. If you already have a business website separate from your eBay auctions, you can simply upload these images to your site and place them in a special folder. However, many eBay sellers do not have a business website and only use eBay for their business. In this case, you can host your images on a photo sharing service.

A photo sharing service is an online site that specializes in image hosting and image sharing. Two very popular, and free, image hosting services are Photobucket, Inc. and PictureTrail, Inc. Many eBay sellers use these sites to host their auction images and also to create photo galleries and slideshows for their auctions.

Photo Gallery or Slideshow
We mentioned earlier that too many photos on your web page can be a problem. One way around this problem is to use a photo gallery or slideshow. Both PictureTrail and Photobucket offer photo gallery and slideshow features. After you have created your gallery or slideshow using the online wizard, you just need to add a simple URL to the template. No HTML or image editing is necessary.