Whether you're trying to buy or sell a car, a rare CD, or a bologna sandwich that bears an uncanny likeness to Calvin Coolidge, eBay is the 21st century's answer to a street market. In fact, with more than 100 million active participants, eBay is sometimes called "the world's largest garage sale." However, if these staggering numbers leave you starry-eyed over anticipated profits, be careful: with millions of items for sale, it's easy for your "Coolidge-lookalike bologna sandwich" to get lost in such a huge and teeming crowd.

Given this reality, the more attractively your auction item is presented and the better the description is written, the greater the chances your item will sell -- and at a higher price.

In this chapter, we show you how to use HTML and CSS effectively to make your eBay auction look wicked cool. You'll discover how to

• Highlight parts of your description
• Add pictures

Although eBay is the biggest auction site online, you can use HTML in item descriptions on most other online auction sites as well, including Yahoo! Auctions, uBid, and others.

Page 304, Listing 17-1: Auction item HTML template (display view) (code view)

.ZIP file of code sample from this chapter (3kb)

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