My daughter sells a lot of stuff on ebay, but one of the bugbears has been how difficult it is to sell customised, or personalised products. Ebay is really TERRIBLE at this! They don't allow buyers to upload files, other than as attachments to ebay messages, which is useless because ebay compress any images sent in a message, making them unusable for any quality customisation.
I've noticed other sellers get around this by sending the customer an email after purchase, asking them to send a return email with their image(s) attached.
That's fine I suppose, but I wanted a better way. So, instead of asking for attachments to an email, I send the customer a URL to our website, where they can view their own image files in a mockup and then, once satisfied, they can upload their file to our server for us to print. The REALLY clever bit is that the URL I send them has a UNIQUE REFERENCE NUMBER in the URL, unique to that customer. I've written a small PHP routine to attach a Unix Timestamp to the end of the URL and I just need to copy this into the customer's email. Here's my routine working ...
url_timestamp.jpg
Once uploaded, this is how the uploaded images appear in my 'uploads' folder. I can then cross-reference them with the ebay customer who uploaded the image by using the Timestamp prefix in each image filename ...
custom_uploads.jpg
Another obvious advantage to this method is that, once the customer is on my website, I can direct them to the main storefront where they can place any follow-up orders at a discount (no ebay fees here!) or browse all of the other stuff we sell.
Winner, winner!
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