I was pretty busy during the holiday with work, so I haven’t been able to post lately. In the spirit of Festivus, I thought I’d start the new year out right by airing some grievances with eBay.
I have a love/hate relationship with eBay. It’s probably my favorite site, and it has truly revolutionized the ability of people to buy and sell goods outside of the traditional retail environment. I’m on it all the time and have bought most of my collection through it over the years. The basic look of the site has evolved, but not changed too much. I started noticing a few things “breaking” a while back and it’s been driving me crazy. I don’t know if its because I’m on a Mac using primarily Safari, but some of the things they have been doing lately seem to fix one problem while breaking something else. Here’s a few of the interface bugs I’ve noticed.
– If you a search from the home page, the results are sorted by “time left” by default. If you want to switch to “time listed”, you need to hit it twice. The first time just refreshes the time left view, and the second actually resorts by time listed.
– The related searches are very handy for me. For a while they moved about half way down the page and I started to just not use them. Now they are back up at the top of the page by the search box where they belong, but if you use them it forgets your “state” and you need to resort the list. It didn’t used to do that.
– Their implementation of search pagination has changed as well. Now, when you are on page 1 and hit page 2, the page jumps to the top of page 1 and then page 2 comes in slowly. That jump is super annoying and totally unnecessary.
– Their messaging app is quite buggy and annoying, and many people don’t even want to use it.
– When you are listing items, the shipping calculator thing is terribly buggy. You can’t just change a parameter and have it work – I’ve found that you need to go through the entire shipping wizzard to make any changes at all.
The user interface changes they have made over the years are usually well thought out, it’s just the implementation is terrible, or at least only focused on IE without consideration to Safari users. In other words, too many things that aren’t bad in and of themselves are made bad because they do not work correctly.
I’m also going to take this opportunity to mourn the loss of transparency into who you are bidding against. In the world of Danish peppermills, there are not too many collectors and part of the fun of eBay was watching the other buyers, seeing who bought what, and trying to figure out who had the most impressive collection. First they took away the names if the auction went over $100 (or something), then you could only see the other bidders if you were bidding on an item, then they only showed the winner, and now they aren’t showing anything. I understand the need to eliminate fraud, but I would think there’s a way to do this without taking so much of the sport out of the “bidding game”. It really makes the site much less enjoyable and I can see it affecting business in the long run.
The new focus on “Buy it Now” is an interesting one, and we still really need to see how it pans out. It makes keeping my book on eBay permanently very cheap, which is convenient and simple, but the fees for each sale have increased dramatically. I guess I am paying for the convenience and automation. The potential downside would be sellers’ focus slowly moving to Buy it Now over auction sales, which would really change the feel of the site.
I’ll end my Festivus rant on a few good notes. I really do like the the My eBay view. There’s a lot you can do to customize the view, and it’s very useful. It’s changed quite often in the past year, and it’s not as good right now as it was a while back, but it is a huge improvement over how it used to be – and it actually seems to work properly. I’m also very happy that you can now watch over 100 items. I don’t actually need that many, but as I was doing research for my book I did, and it was a real pain to delete them all them time. Also, the iPhone app is amazing. It’s fast (even on Edge) and perfectly tailored to the iPhone interface.
Let me know what you think…
