home > e-Commerce sites > eBay

Easily Add Email Forms to eBay Auctions

Placing an email form within your eBay auction is a great way for your potential bidders to contact you or ask you questions without exposing your email address to SPAM. The tutorial below provides step by step instructions for quickly adding an email form to your eBay auctions.

1. Create Your Form HTML

To get started, you must first have your form HTML code already generated and ready for insertion. The best way to do this is with a free form creation service such as myContactForm.com. We have written a full myContactForm.com tutorial here.

2. Login to your eBay Account

a. Go to eBay.com.

b. Click Sign in

c. Enter your account information and click Sign in

3. Create a New Auction

a. Hover over the Sell button and click Sell an item

4. Write the New Auction

a. Create your new auction as your would normally do in eBay. First select your category.

b. Continue creating your auction. When you get to the Describe the item you're selling box, enter your description as you normally would. When you get to the point that you would like to insert an email form, move the cursor to that location.

c. Click the HTML tab

d. At the point in the auction description where you would like the form, paste the form HTML code (Edit > Paste, or CTRL+V, or Right Click and Select Paste). If you do not have your form code created and copied, please read this tutorial to learn how to do so.

e. Once you have pasted your code, you will need to make a few changes manually in order to ensure that eBay formats it correctly.

1. Get rid of any new lines (hard returns) that are within the HTML code. When eBay goes to publish the post, it will interpret these as new lines and replace them with line breaks <br>, adding excessive white space to your form.

2. Make sure the elements of your form work with the eBay layout. I've found that making the form too wide or individual question fields too wide will often break the form. You may need to experiment with your form in order to ensure it works with the layout. Typically 85% or 400 pixels wide for your form will work well.

f. Click the Standard tab to preview your form.

g. Finish creating your eBay auction as you normally would.

5. Verify the Form Location Setting

If you are using myContactForm.com, you will need to login and make sure that you've set the Form Location setting to the proper URL for your eBay auction.

a. Login to myContactForm.com

b. Click the Edit Button

c. Click the Basic Form Information Button

d. Enter all variations of the URL where the form will appear. Typically this is the full URL of the eBay auction. eBay URLs can be tricky, so you are best off opening your auction, submitting the form, and then copying the form location directly from the error message that is displayed. This URL will probably look odd (name you don't recognize, etc.) but, it is correct.

e. Click

Common Problems Encountered by Users:

The auction is showing a bunch of jumbled HTML instead of a form.

When this occurs, it is caused by the form HTML being pasted into the Standard Tab of your auction description instead of the HTML Tab for your auction description. Make sure that you are pasting into the HTML Tab.