The most common problems are special characters and pasted rich text, which don’t always survive the trip as plain text. The best way to fix it is to build a clean master description in plain text using straight quotes, dashes to separate text, and empty lines to separate each section.
What you are seeing on the new marketplace
You have a nice description up on one marketplace. Brand and size are on the first line. After that’s a blank line with measurements as a short bulleted list. Then there are notes about condition. On the original listing it looks great. After you cross list it, the description on the other marketplace is one big paragraph with no line breaks. The bullets have vanished or turned into odd symbols, and the measurements go right into the condition notes.
Sometimes it’s only part of the description that’s affected. The beginning looks good and the rest collapses. You may see stray special characters or text that is wrapped in angle brackets. All of these are the same thing: one marketplace interprets the description one way, and the other marketplace interprets it differently.
The description in this crosslisting is wrong, but the photos, titles, prices and item specifics are correct.
Quick check first: find the first break
To format the description, take thirty seconds to look at the live listing where it is formatted wrong. Open it as a buyer would and start reading at the top. It will usually point to the correct problem.
- A bullet point, decorative dash or check mark means that symbol is the problem.
- If a break happens at a dividing emoji, that emoji is the problem.
- If there are smart quotes or curly quotes and they appear in a garbled mess, they are the problem.
- If there are visible angle brackets in a description and there are letters in between them, that means HTML is being carried over into the description.
- If everything is in one huge block from the first line, then the text was probably pasted from a notes app or document with hidden formatting.
Compare that spot to the same spot in your original listing. If you can see the character that caused it, you already know which solution below to use. Usually, this check will solve your problem without requiring you to modify anything else in your listing.
Why descriptions lose their formatting
Different markets have different systems in place for handling HTML in description text. One may accept and show the HTML literally. Another may change it. The most common reasons description text isn't displaying as expected follow below.
- Text copied from a notepad, word processor, or email often has extraneous formatting copied along with the text. This formatting may not always be visible and varies from rich text styling to special line break characters. One website may clean this formatting up while another may completely ignore it.
- Special characters and decorative bullets. There are round bullets, arrows, stars and check marks. These are characters that can’t be typed on a keyboard and as such appear on different sites in different ways (e.g. replaced by text or line breaks).
- Emojis. Using emojis as section dividers or in place of bullets is extremely risky, as the positioning of lines of text can change based on whether those emojis are included.
- Smart quotes and long dashes. Many writing apps convert quotes and dashes for you. These can appear as code when you submit text in a field that expects only plain text.
- HTML. Sites that let users input HTML often copy/paste descriptions from templates, which contain formatting as HTML tags. Different marketplaces have different ways of interpreting those tags. Some will show tags as formatting. Others will interpret tags as code, and show the tags to the buyer as-is.
Often one description has two or three instances of this description error at the same time, which is why the plain text rebuild below is the most reliable fix.
How to fix it, cause by cause
The goal is one master description for every template. Once you have that, you won't have to repeat the edits for each new listing.
- Strip pasted formatting. Copy the description into a basic text app, set to plain text, first. Then, copy it out. This removes styling notes apps and documents may add.
- Replace bullets with a hyphen and space at the start of the line. Use a hyphen for a structural element across all sites.
- Get rid of emojis that do structural work. If an emoji is a divider or a bullet, use a hyphen instead. Keep emojis out of the description if you crosslist to a lot of sites.
- Replace smart quotes with straight quotes, and long dashes with regular hyphens. Turning off smart punctuation in your keyboard settings should help.
- Delete HTML tags. If there are headings in bold, rewrite them in regular, plain text. For example, if there is a heading that says Measurements, just put the list of measurements below it.
- Add a blank line to divide sections. Blank lines are the simplest structure and the most likely to be kept.
- Clean and save your description, crosslist, then quickly check the listing to see what needs to be added or fixed.
If some sites still format your description weird after this, just edit that listing by hand. This should be good enough for a small number of items.
Keep clean descriptions in sync with PrimeLister
Your goal should be to get your description as clean of formatting as possible. Then, figure out a way to get that description across as many sites as possible and to keep it there. Fixing formatting one listing at a time is good for a small number of items, but it adds up when talking about your entire closet.
- Crosslist to Poshmark, eBay, Mercari, Depop, Etsy and Facebook Marketplace from one listing, so the cleaned description reaches more buyers without having to retype it.
- Bulk actions on multiple listings is useful for quick cleanup of a batch of older listings.
- Inventory auto-sync and auto-delisting is useful so the same item doesn't get sold twice as you are editing it.
- Get a free tool to find duplicates to help identify repeat listings.
Each Poshmark Bot and Depop Bot comes with a 7-day free trial.
Frequently asked questions
Emojis can be included in description, as long as they aren’t holding the description together. Emoji in the middle of sentence is low risk, but using it to break up the description is where breaks usually start.
What happened to my listing? The edit and buyer screens can display text differently. As much as possible check the buyer view on a phone, since that's where the listing will be viewed the most.
When should I clean up my old listings? Old and sold listings can be ignored. Only active listings should be changed. Clean the master template first, work through the live listings and start with the highest priced items.