Skip to content

News Blog

Get the latest alerts and community news about eBay Web Services here in our blog.

How the Right Rail Looks on the New View Item Page

Posted by Laurel Kline in Sandbox & Product News
Wednesday, Sep.17.2008, 7:03 PM PT

Update (25 Sep, 2008): You can now see the right rail in the Sandbox. Remember it only shows up on listings that were posted by Store sellers.

I'm hearing from people that they are unable to see what the right rail looks like on their listings. The right rail is enabled in the Sandbox only for listings by eBay Store sellers. To have a right rail show up on your listing, you need to open a store in the Sandbox.

Or, it that's too much hassle, you can list using this test account that we created just for use in the Sandbox.
Username: external_api_seller
Password: 123456
I don't know what will happen if we all try to use it at once, but it will be fun to find out! And please play nicely and don't change any information for this test user.

We're having a temporary glitch in the Sandbox that is preventing the right rail from showing up right now, so I'm posting these screenshots of what a wide listing looks like with the right rail. You can see that the 1200px wide image shows up just fine, and the right rail gets added on top of that:

Widelistingwithrightrail

Here's the view of that page in my browser window (expanded fully on a 1280 px x 1024 px monitor). You can see that the right rail is completely hidden on the right side, but the 1000 px bar is fully visible. Only the 1200 px bar is cut off by the window edge.

Pageon1280x1024monitor

Update (25 Sep, 2008): Here's a screenshot of the page taken at an 800x600 resolution. The 700 px bar is the only one that shows. Plus the basketball image on the left is 65 px, so you have 65 px + 700 px = 765 px to work with at this resolution.

Ngvi800x600

I hope this clears up some confusion about the right rail. Please post to the comments if you still have questions. And I'll update this as soon as I hear that the Sandbox glitch is fixed, and you can see the right rail properly again.

« previous article | Perma Link | next article»

Published Comments (3):

     
  1. cfrphoto1 wrote the following on 9/26/2008 2:23:18 AM:
    I do not agree that 800 x 600 pixels is an appropriate choice if such a small minority of eBay users still use old and obsolete monitors. It would be better if the eBay page filled the browser window side to side with suitable expansion of the iFrame. Scrolling should occur only if interior elements force the iFrame to be too wide to fit in the window. I believe that forcing sellers to specify a fixed width is a bad idea as is the move by eBay to make pages a fixed, too narrow width. Some of the new pages like My eBay do not scroll properly (the page jumps) when a wheel mouse is used. Making pages wider to fit the browser window will help minimize vertical scrolling. The new page format virtually guarantees that most buyers won't see the description without extra scrolling. The new larger image is bad because it is invariably a reprocessed jpg, often showing artifacts that detract from the appearance. Also very bad is the tendency of images rendered initially with the wrong aspect ratio to take several seconds to "snap" into the proper aspect or fail to render correctly.
  2. laurel.developerrelations wrote the following on 9/25/2008 7:46:25 PM:
    Hi patlp, Subha told us that 10-15% of eBay buyers still use an 800 px x 600 px resolution, so eBay is definitely testing at that resolution. And you should too. You can see her post here: http://developer.ebay.com/community/blog/article/?category=Blog.Developer&name=http://ebaydeveloper.typepad.com/dev/2008/08/we-heard-your-f.html Sellers decide on an individual basis how wide to make their listing templates. We recommend that you make your template less than 800 px wide to look good at even 800x600 resolutions, but it is your decision. Your customer base may tend to have higher resolutions. And then we'll just tack the right rail on to whatever width you decide on. I added a screenshot taken at 800x600 resolution for comparison. Thanks! Laurel Kline Developer Relations
  3. patlp wrote the following on 9/25/2008 11:21:23 AM:
    Laurel, the stats from a featured store owned by a friend show that almost 50% of buyers are still using a monitor resoluton of 1024 or smaller. Are tests being done with 1024 monitors as well?

You must be logged in to post a comment. Log in now or join the network to get access to all the network benefits.

Subscribe to Blog


rating

     

Login to rate this item.

Bookmarking

Login to add this page to your bookmarks.

Tagging

Login to add your own tag

 

Blog Archive

A complete listing of blog category archives.