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eBay Denies New Design Is Broken, Blames Users
krick-zero writes "eBay recently rolled out a new page design. Many eBay sellers are reporting issues with missing description text, resulting in lost sales. Buyers are reporting the same intermittent issue, on multiple platforms, with multiple browsers. After complaining to eBay customer service, one user got this response: 'I have reviewed several of your listings using my computer and had several of my coworkers view your listings as well and we are seeing the complete listings. Many times when buyers are not able to see the whole description or just bits and pieces it is due to browser issues they are having. A lot of times if they simply clear out their cache and cookies or change browsers (i.e. change from Internet explorer to Firefox or vice versa) they no longer have this problem.'"
It seems to have a lot to do with the way they name their Javascripts and stuff. But once I clear cache and cookies, it goes away for a few weeks or a few months. That's probably when MS changes things again. This doesn't happen on most sites... seems most that it happens on ones that are, I am guessing, breaking some sort of rule.
ONe of the worst things that you can do as a company is blame the user/customer... that is unless their plan is to assume that their users are idiots and therefore wouldn't go elsewhere or they haven't thought this out at all.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Interesting how in the before/after diagram, they zoomed out the old item page to make it look less clear. Also, they chose a crappier picture (and an entirely different product).
This is the kind of sloppiness/deviousness I expect fat-burning pill advertisements, not a big corporation like eBay. They should have shown the same product at the same resolution so people could objectively see the differences.
The problem here is there are open standards for web sites, published by the W3C. HTML4, CSS, DOM.
If eBay would follow the standards and perform some basic testing on the common browsers which all happen to be easily available for testing, they could assure the site would work for everyone.
They're going beyond the standards and trying to do some browser-specific scripting no doubt, or utilizing features that are buggy in some browsers and beyond the basic standard.
All this to try and be cute. And make their pages feel more dynamic.
If they weren't doing this, nobody would be complaining, noone's experience or ability to use the site for it's intended purpose would be getting degraded.
"No shit, Sherlock", but eBay's cure was worse than the disease.
With the "new hotness", I now have pictures that obscure the auction listings when I'm scrolling through items because Javashit thinks I'm hovering over the image (bad! stop doing that! I didn't ask you to do that!). If I find an item of interest and want to look at the pictures, I get a pop-up window (WTF?) with a slide-show-like sidebar (worse!), and since the whole shebang requires Javashit to display anything, and that very same script denies the ability to right-click-saveAs the image, it's now considerably more difficult to actually compare the image of a product with a reference image.
For that matter, it's now practically impossible to compare two images of the same item with each other. When eBay used URLs that pointed to .JPGs, you could middle-click them to pop the image open in a new tab for viewing or saving. With the "new hotness", you're middle-clicking javascript:void(), and nothing happens.
None of which addresses the root cause of the problem: 99% of the time, it's a crappy cell phone picture taken at 640x480, or generic clipart from the item's manufacturer, where you're lucky if it's 320x200. That's not eBay's fault, that's the sellers' fault.
If you want to solve the problems with images, stop hiding them behind Javascript-reliant slide-shows. Less Web 2.0 crap, more usability testing. Fucking web designers. It's no longer an auction listing site, it's a web technology demo. Hey, web designers, maybe if you stopped this continual race of trying to keep your resumes well-padded and buzzword-compliant at the expense of end-user usability, your customers might not leave you in bewilderment and disgust, and you might not need to hand your resumes out as often.
I guess my thought is, it really doesn't matter if it's the user's fault or not.
If you're a company selling something - a product or service - it's up to you to make it simple to use for the people that are trying to use it (or at least, the people in your target market that are trying to use it), or lose their business. It doesn't really matter if they're doing it wrong. If they come to your site with the same browser and system they have always used and suddenly it doesn't work, well then the fact that it's the browser that's implementing something wrong doesn't matter to them because the site worked well before. Maybe it is. Maybe there's a minor thing the site implements wrong.
I look at this and feel like this is simply a classic case where you have a team of developers that are doing the website at eBay, or any major corporation, and they like having jobs. So at some moment in time there is a necessary site redesign, and they spend months, perhaps years, working on it. Then the site goes live, they spend the next few months to work out the bugs, and there's the question "OK, so, what do we do now?"
So the obvious question is "We start work on the NEXT-NEXT generation website! We'll start on it right away!" And this cycles over and over, because if you say to management "You know what? The website we have is pretty damn good, functional, and we've worked most of the bugs out - there's no need to upgrade", the next thing to say is "So we don't need a gigantic web development team, right?"
This is the only reason I can think of for some of the upgrades I've seen at major websites the past year or so - websites that were previously functional, easy to use, fast, etc. and are now buggy, overladen with crap, etc.
I would agree with that.
But a lot of people seem to prefer keeping the flash, even if it compromises function a bit.
The Google home page design philosophy seems to be the exception to the rule, most businesses follow the Yahoo philosophy, meaning more flash = better, sometimes even better than working 100% correctly.
Wanting things to just work and be simple, fast, and efficient as possible seems to be a totally nerdy/geeky thing.
Most of the marketing and business people who make actual decisions seem to think flashiness is really really important, even if it means the site's coding will be much more complex, a good bit slower/less efficient, more memory hungry, and have some bugs.
problem is, eBay has critical mass. If you're a seller, you want to sell on the site people are going to buy, and that's eBay. If you're a buyer, you want to visit a site with lots of items for sale, or where there's lots of sellers. Again, eBay. If you sell on a smaller site, you either won't sell the item, have to discount it to get any bids, or hope that single bid will attract others. If you buy, the smaller sites may or may not have the item you want, so either you wait forever for it, or have to settle for whatever you find with little choice.
eBay has been doing a ton of crap the past 10 years, and people swear to never use eBay again. Yet eBay keeps growing. Either the negative press is having no effect, or the sellers who leave reluctantly come back. Face it, look at what changes have happened - increased transaction and listing fees, use of Paypal, feedback changes, etc. But eBay gets away with it because they can - the alternatives may be better for everyone, but unable to attract the critical mass to be sustainable, they fade out. There are few auction sites online that everyone knows about, so if you're looking for something, it's eBay.
I will admit I liked their old design better - it loaded faster for me and was snappier and pages were easier to use. I find the new pages awful and the new site worse. Of course, people are only complaining now because eBay just changed ebay.com - these new page layouts have been present on all the international sites for months or even years now.
What I don't understand is why people go onto eBay and buy stuff you can buy online at Amazon or retail, often for the same price or less.
But a lot of people seem to prefer keeping the flash, even if it compromises function a bit.
Yup. Slashcode is an excellent example of this. [sigh]
In terms of storing things in cookies instead of the backend, I can understand their reply. Why did GMail have an outage a few weeks ago? Because the load balancing layer, which from what I can tell is required to steer you to the server your session is on, wasn't scaled properly to accommodate new code, some of which was designed to help improve service availability.
Unless you design things very carefully (and the larger the site the more carefully this stuff has to be designed), creating server sessions can mean exposing your users to single points of failure. It can also mean subjecting users to bad user experiences when their session times out.
Storing sessions in memory cached in a single server, with a router to get you to the right server, backed by a clustered database seems like a good solution, but is complex and can have performance problems. Which seems to be what happened to Google. Also remember that cache layers are great for reading, but problematic in a situation with lots of writing (for example, Ebay).
what about setting cache rules on those files. its been some time since i last really developed a web site as i cheat now and use drupal but i remember there being a tag that would tell the browser how long a page could be cached for if at all. By your logic instead of a programming managing its memory you think the user should just have to reboot the computer when the memory is full.
When you provide a service to a customer and they are complaining about something not working and you test and test and it works fine it means you have to go deeper and work with your customer to see the issue. you cant just tell them its there problem and expect them to stick around as paying customers.
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For those wishing to file a Class Action against eBay/PayPal:
http://www.43things.com/things/view/193389/file-a-class-action-lawsuit-against-ebay-and-paypal
http://www.screw-paypal.com/paypal_lawsuits.html
Sounds like a lousy time for selling, but a great time for BARGAINS. If half the buyers can't access the new pages then that's half as much competition on the bidding.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Bullshit. Craigslist is growing at ebay's expense. Almost nobody auctions stuff on ebay anymore; it's all stores. They're not growing; most of their accounts (like mine) are stale.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if they are spending quite a few dimes for QA testing.
Specifically: Quad-core 4GB test machines with Gigabit Ethernet and running freshly-installed OSs.
I'll let the pros handle the serious stuff, but I can tell you that java on windows is most emphatically not common for high-volume consumer websites.
Having different servers handling different pages types isn't awful, as far as I know, and the OP didn't say as much. The problem is that they grossly miscalculate how many servers they need. That's troubling and may explain why I have never known of a great sys admins coming from eBay. Moreover, if they were smart on the systems end, they have a system with the agility and flexibility to adjust quickly, which it doesn't seem they do.
I think part of the problem may simply be that eBay started so long ago, that it's stack doesn't look at all like the younger, big consumer web apps.
Little-to-no caching is just crazy on eBay's part. There's a reason people are so interested in further developing things like memcached: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memcached .
Anyway, I'm not an engineer. I know a lot of details about web companies' applications, and I have a basic understanding of what everything does and the major reasons why. I'm fortunate in being able to ask the pros a lot of questions, since I have worked at web companies for the last 4 years. I just figured, in case no one else answered your question, I might be able to say something to help you eventually find the full answer.
In this particular scenario, it seems like Ebay is punishing itself. The buyer can't get the page to work, so doesn't bid on the seller's stuff. The item either doesn't sell or it sells for less. Since Ebay's fee structure is a listing fee plus a percentage of the final sale price, they stand to make less if they choose to ignore this.
That scares me.
Hmm. I have a different opinion.
a technical institute that does provide a BA in web design.
That scares me.
Not exactly. They are growing but mostly due to foreign (often Chinese) vendors who can sell direct rather than through e.g. Walmart. And they now try to attract big vendors in US (like GM) so they are growing. But the more they try to be like Amazon the more they open themselves up to competition. One of those days it will come back to haunt them but not yet.
Craigslist is only good for local purchases. Anything long distance is still Ebay.
You've just described Amazon Marketplace, except that it's for regular sales rather than auctions.
I've got a box of books and CDs in my basement that I've listed on Amazon over the past year and I can just forget about them until purchases come in. It's much nicer than dealing with Ebay.
Web consulting +