Free eBay Image Hosting Resources
Looking for free eBay image hosting? You need a good photo to persuade folks that your eBay offering is what you say it is! So where do you get your eBay photos hosted?
I'm sure YOU know that the single most effective tool of persuasion is a good photo - especially when you're selling on eBay and your potential buyers can't physically 'see' what you're offering. The thing is - do you use free eBay image hosting (from eBay) or do you look elsewhere?
If you use eBay's picture service, your first photo is free, however you'll be charged for additional photos (depending on the photo sizes). This might just eat up some of your profit margins unless you host your photos elsewhere. The good news is that there's an abundance of free eBay image hosting sites that will allow you to upload your photos for free and then link them to your eBay listings.
This way, you can post as many images as you want on your auctions without having to pay any extra eBay image fees.
Using some of these free image hosting sites (see below for details), you can also edit your photos online (rotate, resize, sharpen, etc) without the need of any special editing software. This comes in handy sometimes when you need to do some quick editing on-the-fly. In addition, you can set up your own customized photo gallery to display all uploads on one page. You can also, using your photo gallery, provide your customers a convenient way to browse your offerings.
Basic Steps First
Quick Tip: Perhaps the most important thing is to keep image size to a bare minimum. You want people to see your photos, not get frustrated and go elsewhere because the page won't load! So compress your images, or use the 'save image for web' setting when using image editors such as Gimp or Photoshop.
Here's some basic tips to keep your page load and eBay auction listing load times nice and fast...
- Keep your images small. It doesn't have to be full page. Large sized images will drain your free bandwidth fast, and frustrate potential buyers. Believe me, you want to make their browsing experience easy, not difficult for them! Keeping images under 400x300 is a good idea.
- Avoid adding too many images to your single eBay auction or website page. Just put a couple of your best images up, then add a link to a photo album hosted elsewhere. That's how you can beat the bandwidth limits.
- Use the common JPEG setting for photos, and compress as much as possible (making sure you don't sacrifice the image quality!) Most photo editing software will let you specifiy the amount of JPEG compression when saving your images.
Free eBay Image Hosting Options
After resizing your photos, you can now upload them on your selected free eBay image hosting service. One of the most common image hosts which links photos to eBay is Photobucket. You'll need to have your own account in Photobucket before uploading images and linking them to eBay. You can also upload multiple images (called 'batch uploading') at the same time by selecting the 'submit multiple pictures' feature on Photobucket.
Once your pictures are hosted with Photobucket, copy the URL of your photo and place this into your eBay listing. (Place the image URL where it asks for 'the URL of your picture'). You can add borders and other details etc with the HTML. Check eBay's help and resources page for more details on this.
There's also Auctiva. Auctiva is a popular eBay image host and has a free 30 day trial, otherwise it'll cost you $9.95 a month for the standard plan and $19.95 a month for the premium plan. The benefits to using Auctiva is that they've got hundreds of great eBay auction templates, free image watermarking, and heaps of time saving tools for listing your products etc on eBay.
Another option is VillagePhotos.com. These guys make hosting your pics pretty simple. No limits to image size, submit images to a public photo gallery if you feel inclined, and upgrade from $3.75 - $48 per month to get unlimited bandwidth. (You'll only need that if you are hosting something like 5000 image or more a month!). Generally you can't go too wrong sticking with their FREE plan.