eBay Hacks

Annoy Them with Sound

Drive away your bidders by putting background music and sound effects in your auctions.

Although I despise sound in web pages, I feel compelled to show you how to do it properly so you don’t pick up any bad habits on the street.

Warning

The number-one rule to remember when including sound or music in web pages is to provide a means of turning it off. Otherwise, your bidders will eventually discover the workaround by themselves . . . and they probably won’t come back.

Some Call It Elevator Music

You can insert background music (in either .wav or .midi format) into your auction with this line of code:

<bgsound src="http://www.ebayhacks.com/files/aah.wav" loop=1>

where the loop parameter specifies the number of times to play the sound. The problem is that the <bgsound> element has no controls: no way for your customers to turn off the sound or adjust the volume. In other words, a poor choice.

The more general-purpose <embed> tag can do everything <bgsound> does, but it also includes a controller box:

<embed src="http://www.ebayhacks.com/files/aah.wav" hidden=false autostart=true loop=true></embed>

The loop=true parameter can be replaced with playcount=3 to play the sound a specified number of times and then stop. Go to http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com for further documentation on embedded objects.

When to Use Sound

Sound can be useful when text and photos just won’t do. For example, if you’re selling a music box, you may want to include a clip of the music it plays, especially ...