We recently deployed our SR1 release of the Marketplace and Payment Services for Office Accounting 2007.  The team did a fantastic job getting it out there, especially considering that we didn't have power for most of the weekend!  Based on some of the feedback we were getting from the message boards, we added the ability to preview eBay listings in the listing wizard.  As I mentioned in a previous posting, there are several ways to customize the look of your eBay listings so it's nice to see what the listing is going to look like before the it actually appears on eBay.

The purpose of the preview is to give a good idea of how the listing will look on eBay.com.  EBay does not support “preview listing” functionality through eBay.com or through the SOAP API, see http://dev-forums.ebay.com/thread.jspa?threadID=500002523.  As a result we implement the preview page without eBay's help, meaning that it is effectively impossible for the preview to look exactly the same as the actual listing.  Also, the eBay SOAP API does not provide support for rendering certain types of listing information (for example, item specifics) in the form that it appears on eBay.com, so we have to omit that information in the preview.  But the preview does a pretty good job of letting you see what the listing will look like.

  • You can preview any listing by clicking on the Preview link in the listing wizard grid, here's a picture.  The listing doesn't need to be ready to list in order to preview.  Like I said, we can't render the item specifics (such as the publication year for a book) so we stick in a placeholder if your item has item specifics.
  • The preview displays in a separate window (photo). 
  • Here's what the listing looks like on eBay (photo).

(Updated 1/12/2007: actually eBay.com does support a preview.  The SOAP API does not.)