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.'"

Comments

bad plan

[wizardforce]

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.

Re:Lack of standards.

[mysidia]

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.

Javascript's the problem, not the solution

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA:

2. Inadequate Pictures. Pictures are an invaluable tool for buyers and eBay pictures were considered inadequate due to small size, poor quality, and overwhelming emphasis on text information.

"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.

Does it matter whose fault it is?

[GTarrant]

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.

Re:Does it matter whose fault it is?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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."

Here's looking at you, /.

Re:Lack of standards.

[mysidia]

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.

Re:broken by design

[tlhIngan]

Seems to me that if they want to sell me something, they'll adapt to my usage. And if eBay wants to continue to dominate the auction market, they'll make their site readable by buyers and sellers as well as customer service reps.

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.

Re:Lack of standards.

[BrokenHalo]

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]

Always the same story

[AmigaMMC]

With eBay it's always the sellers' fault. Power Sellers have dropped by the thousands, including myself, because of eBay policies. Starting 1.5 to 2 years ago they decided it was time to screw sellers to make buyers happy. There are several lawsuits against ebay/paypal (same company). People have had their PayPal funds blocked for myself (a friend of mine included) of up to several thousand dollars sending these sellers to bankrupt. Since Paypal is not a bank and the U.S. Government of course doesn't regulate this random financial entity account owners are screwed. With PayPal is always the same story, when things don't work they'll tell you it's your fault. They're always right.

.

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

Re:Always the same story

[ta bu shi da yu]

Similar to the situation in Australia.

In Australia PayPal is classed as a financial institution, and is regulated under the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA). When eBay tried to make PayPal the only payment method, and excluded things such as bank transfer, there was a huge uproar and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) stopped this from happening.

Personally, I'll never use eBay as they seem like a massive rip off and far too risky to actually get the goods you purchase.

Re:Of course they say that

[commodore64_love]

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.