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

Of course they say that

[Ralph Spoilsport]

God ferbid they spend a dime on honest to goodness black box QA testing on all platforms and browsers.

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.

Re:Of course they say that

[Tubal-Cain]

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 get that a lot with hotmail

[erroneus]

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.

Re:I get that a lot with hotmail

[Compholio]

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.

It's probably proxy caching (possibly browser caching). As a large website you're supposed to set the appropriate caching options, or "Cache-Control: no-cache" if you're lazy. That way when you update your pages/resources it actually takes effect. Alternatively, if you weren't forward thinking about such things you can rename the page/resource and that will force your clients to grab the new info.

Re:I get that a lot with hotmail

[QuoteMstr]

Or better yet, set resources to never expire, and instead incorporate a hash of the resource into the name of the resource. That way, clients can cache each resource forever, but will automatically get the new version when the resource changes.

Re:I get that a lot with hotmail

[Skapare]

That still doesn't work if the original content failed to be completely delivered, and was not detected as such because no length is sent (because it's effectively dynamic because some script is pulling the content out of a database). The script quits. The browser got empty content and cached it. Now cache hits pull up empty content.

The script on the server end needs to collect ALL the content before sending any, and count all the bytes, construct an HTTP Length header, then send the headers and content. Then if transmission fails, the browser knows it's not cachable because the length didn't match. If the script gets an error from the database, it should try again to a certain point, and if the failure is considered permanent, mark the response not to be cached and finish out with an error response code.

Re:I get that a lot with hotmail

[QuoteMstr]

Oh, of course. Plus, you need the server-side infrastructure to keep the hashes current and to ensure that everyone that refers to a given resource refers to the latest version. That doesn't come for free. Still, when the system works, it's elegant and quite efficient.

By the way: you don't necessarily need a content-length header. You can use chunked encoding instead. If the script encounters an error, can you close the connection without sending the terminating chunk, which will (or at least should) cause browsers to act just like they'd received a bogus content-length header.

I've had similar problems

[NitroWolf]

I've had similar problems and it always comes back to the javascript they are using. If I change the way the JS is allowed via AdBlock or NoScript, things start working... if I keep it at my normal settings, the descriptions disappear.

Re:I've had similar problems

[IamTheRealMike]

NoScript? I'll laugh if it turns out this problem is caused by NoScript or ad blockers. First rule of supporting a complex website - tell users to switch these tools off, clear their cache, cookies and try again (also, privacy proxies/porn filters)

No competent computer user likes to be told to do this routine sort of thing, but the unhappy fact is that there are a lot of people out there that are somewhere between total n00b and web expert, who use tools that screw around with website contents in flight and then can't figure out that it breaks things. I've had to clean up NoScript created messes before. The number of support complaints it created was amazing.

Lack of standards.

[freedom_india]

There was a short period of time when companies actually made sure their products were usable by people.
That was in 1970s.
Electronics then were not complicated, but sophisticated enough. And Walkmans would actually work.
Because Open Standards were harsh.
Like the standards for an audio tape or even an audio CD.
They were expected to work with ANY player as long as it met the standards.
That is why i could take a take from my boom box, plug into a walkman and listen on way to school and back.
Or how LP records worked.
Standards governed and restricted how companies could use "innovation" to screw up their own products.
The rot started with Sound Blaster.
It was an Industry standard as opposed to open standard.
Browsers? There is no standard today.
Once you take away a standard that sets minimum expectations, then obviously things don't work.
Blaming eBay is easy. Blaming lack of standards and blaming all is hard.
WHom should we blame? Microsoft for their UTTER lack of interest in adopting open standards?
IBM for its insistence on peeing into the wind?
Netscape for its collosal stupidity in failing to set standards?
eBay for not knowing what a standard is and breaking things up?

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.

Re:Lack of standards.

[freedom_india]

Of course they would do.
If i were a tape player manufacturer, i would try to "enhance" the features by offering non-standard features: like LP recording (twice the capacity at half the speed, thus making it unplayable on any other system), etc.
The fact is that punishment is absent when you don't follow standards.
If Sony made a walkman that didn't hold a Tape, it can't advertise it could hold a Tape(false adverts) and the market would instantly punish it for it.
How do you punish a monopoly like eBay?

Re:Lack of standards.

[Strider-]

The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

Re:Lack of standards.

[erroneus]

Perhaps it's my geeky-nerdiness, but "function first, flash second. if flash compromises function, remove the flash."

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:Lack of standards.

[Runaway1956]

Obviously, you have never used a hammer seriously. I have. I am very picky about my hammers. What many slashdotters might call a "hammer", I would probably throw into the trash. I mean that very seriously - I have thrown hammers into the trash, because they were unfit for any serious use.

Junk aside - for what purpose do you need a hammer? I own about 15 different hammers, but I'll be damned if you'll get a ball-peen hammer to drive finishing nails with, or a chipping hammer to drive 16D nails with.

The type and quality of even a hammer is a non-frivolous matter to someone who really needs a hammer.

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]

Re:Lack of standards.

[fatalwall]

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.

Re:Lack of standards.

[dstar]

The problem is not a lack of standards. The problem is failing to follow standards.

Re:Lack of standards.

[indiechild]

Most of the time, form and function can co-exist very well. It's just that eBay's developers are too lazy/incompetent to do it right, like the majority of web designers/developers.

It never ceases to amaze me how many "professional" web developers can't even write a basic HTML and CSS page without a dozen+ errors and sheer semantic idiocy (like using tables for layout).

Re:Lack of standards.

[zippthorne]

Both of those machines filled their respective niches admirably.

The DC-10, by being an incredibly robust and versatile airframe (Mid-air re-fuelers are typically DC-10s, as well as the microgravity laboratory aircraft (a.k.a. vomit comet)). The pinto by being an affordable, safe, relatively fuel-efficient automobile.

  I fail to see what the point of that was.

Re:Lack of standards.

[MaskedSlacker]

How do you punish a monopoly like eBay?

Sell/Buy on craigslist.

Re:Lack of standards.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Or, more succinctly, "function over form."

Way too many people prefer "form over function" - I chalk it up to a completely self-centered view of the world "if it looks OK on my computer, it must work fine for everyone else too." They also seem to forget that they are in business to make money and every single customer that can't use their website is a lost sale, "pretty over profit"

Re:Lack of standards.

[MaskedSlacker]

I only use one kind of hammer: sledge.

Of course, I never build anything either. I just like breaking stuff.

Re:Lack of standards.

[commodore64_love]

>>>Because [1970s] Open Standards were harsh. Like the standards for an audio tape or even an audio CD.

You wrote a nice soliloquy but it's based on a false premise. The examples you list were Not standards. Audio tapes and CDs were *proprietary* formats owned by Philips and Sony/Philips respectively. And in the 1970s there was a giant war between 8-track and compact cassette. Also Betamax and VHS. Also 3" versus 3.2" versus 3.5" floppies.

You are seeing in the golden haze of nostalgia a time period when "everything just worked" but that never existed. Format wars and differing formats have always been a problem. (Yes even the inventor of the phonograph Edison had to deal with rival formats.)

Re:Lack of standards.

[commodore64_love]

Yep:

- Floppies ranged in size from 8 inch to 5 inch to 3.5 inch to 3 inch
- Computers were available from Atari, Apple, Commodore, Texas Instruments and not compatible with one another
- Movies might be sold on videotape, or videorecord, or laserdisc, or film
- Music might be sold on records, or 45s, or 78s, or compact cassettes, or 8-tracks
- Game systems were Odyssey, Atari,Intellivision, Magnavox
- VCRs could be either VHS or Betamax or Umatic

Any view that the 70s were somehow free of format problems is merely nostalgia. There were plenty of of problems with formats.

Re:Lack of standards.

[denmarkw00t]

It never ceases to amaze me how many "professional" web developers can't even write a basic HTML and CSS page without a dozen+ errors and sheer semantic idiocy (like using tables for layout).

While true, you can't just blame the web developers. I've had at least 10 years of experience in web development, starting with mostly HTML and experimenting with CSS when it was just hitting the web, but experience doesn't count for much in the industry. So, I had some classes at a state university that didn't treat web design as a profession until recently, and transferred a couple years ago to a technical institute that does provide a BA in web design.

I'm at the end of my scholastic career, but I can assure you that despite what has been taught at my school, about 5% of the people in the web design curriculum will actually be prepared based on what they learned at this school, and most likely they had prior experience in web design (like me). We learned Flash and the other Adobe apps, some (and I mean SOME) HTML, a touch of CSS and thats about it. Javascript? Nope. W3C standards? They don't mention them. Setting up and / or using a web server? HA! Not a chance.

It's sad, but its true - creating a usable Internet depends on education, and we can't depend on people to learn that themselves - some like myself have, but many more take the route that "if I take it in a class I'll know everything I need to know," and these people will be the majority of developers working at eBay and other web sites.

That scares me.

Re:Lack of standards.

[mcheu]

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.

Re:Lack of standards.

[Ira Sponsible]

That's why I make my own hammers. My favorite is the 1.00 lb tungsten-steel head hammer with stainless steel shaft wrapped in a nice rubber grip. It's small but the extra weight is great for good driving force in smaller spaces and precision work. But I actually use my stainless/brass mini-sledge more often (it's not much larger overall than the tungsten one but it's a lot heavier), it's great for really putting some hurt on a stubborn part. And no discussion of hammers would be complete without repeating the old saw that when your only tool is a hammer everything looks like the back of someone's head.

Re:Lack of standards.

[SL Baur]

That scares me.

Hmm. I have a different opinion.

a technical institute that does provide a BA in web design.

That scares me.

Re:Lack of standards.

[Lincolnshire Poacher]

> Sell/Buy on craigslist.

Of which eBay is a 25% shareholder. Not really punishing them much, is it?

Re:Lack of standards.

[QuoteMstr]

Just use the classic mode for everything --- discussions, comments, and so on --- and spare yourself the worst of it. Just change your settings. (And while you're at it, nuke Idle from orbit, just to be sure.)

Re:Lack of standards.

[Tynam]

Support a better rival, like eBid. On the internet, big monopolies with huge name recognition advantage can be ousted by upstart competitors, if they're sufficiently better to use. It's just difficult. Look what happened to yahoo.

Re:Lack of standards.

[MartinSchou]

The pinto by being an affordable, safe, relatively fuel-efficient automobile.

From Wikipedia:

The safety record of the Ford Pinto has become a landmark narrative on the evils of amoral companies putting profit ahead of customer safety. The articles and news stories about the Pinto released at the time generally portray the car as more prone to fire than other cars of the time. They also portray Ford as callous for knowingly and willfully ignoring safety concerns.
[...]
Through early production of the model, it became a focus of a major scandal when it was alleged that the car's design allowed its fuel tank to be easily damaged in the event of a rear-end collision which sometimes resulted in deadly fires and explosions. Critics argued that the vehicle's lack of a true rear bumper as well as any reinforcing structure between the rear panel and the tank, meant that in certain collisions, the tank would be thrust forward into the differential, which had a number of protruding bolts that could puncture the tank. This, and the fact that the doors could potentially jam during an accident (due to poor reinforcing) allegedly made the car less safe than its contemporaries.

Ford allegedly was aware of this design flaw but refused to pay what was characterized as the minimal expense of a redesign. Instead, it was argued, Ford decided it would be cheaper to pay off possible lawsuits for resulting deaths. Mother Jones magazine obtained the cost-benefit analysis that it said Ford had used to compare the cost of an $11 ($56 today, allowing for inflation) repair against the monetary value of a human life, in what became known as the Ford Pinto memo.[6][7][8] The characterization of Ford's design decision as gross disregard for human lives in favor of profits led to significant lawsuits. While Ford was acquitted of criminal charges, it lost several million dollars and gained a reputation for manufacturing "the barbecue that seats four."[9] Nevertheless, as a result of this identified problem, Ford initiated a callback which provided a dealer installable "safety kit" that installed some plastic protective material over the offending sharp objects, negating the risk of tank puncture."[10]

I'm not an expert on cars, car safety, car history, nor was the car in question ever sold in Denmark, yet I still know that using the Pino as an example of a "safe" car is rather silly.

Re:Lack of standards.

[zippthorne]

I say it was safe, because the actual incidence of fire-related fatalities resulting from rear-end collision (the failure mode which supposedly was completely ignored by ford in their cost-benefit analysis), turned out to be lower than other cars in its class. The risk was overblown, and ford was correct, in hindsight.

It is a very good example though of getting people worked up over FUD and giving a car company an undeservedly bad reputation. Every car company always weighs the costs of additional measures against the "value" of the lives saved. If they didn't, we'd all drive tanks, and there wouldn't be roads, only railways, and they'd have a built in governor limiting you to 5mph anyway. Oh, and only the five richest people in the country could afford one.

Sorry, this is eBay's fault.

[mysidia]

Expecting users to switch browsers or clear cache to see page text is absurd.

If users can't see description text, they have a bug in their application.

By the way. I'm not at all pleased with the new eBay design.

They think they're being all fancy, cute, and Web 2.0-like i'm sure.

And in the process... forgetting about the quality of the user experience and ease of use (which includes not having to switch browsers, clear cache, cookies, re-login, and other voodoo "self help" techniques), which basically are hallmarks of a low-quality, poorly done, poorly tested web site.

And straight up, that sucks, and shows unprofessional behavior on eBay's part IMO.

It's not the least bit hard to hire and train CSRs who won't blame the user for everything, and who'll actually help determine what's going wrong, and get the user in touch with someone to report the bugs....

Blame the user, or their choice of browser is the absolute worst thing they could possibly do. In a decade when standards-based is the norm, and REAL web-sites are tested and qualified with the major browsers, including IE7, IE8, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc, and any malfunction of the site is the site's problem, not just the complaining users' problem!

Re:Sorry, this is eBay's fault.

[Shikaku]

<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="Wed, 19 Feb 2003 08:00:00 GMT"> <!-- or any other day in the past, place in all your pages-->

Hey Ebay, I just fixed the cache clearing problem, can I get paid now?

Re:Sorry, this is eBay's fault.

[robmv]

Will you write a program to update the files already cached on users browsers? will you distribute?, when something is cached, it is already cached. You can not force it to be cleared with a META tag. but that do not deny that EBay developers probably must be more careful how to use cache , maybe they need to start using versioned URLs for the applications assets like JS files

Re:Sorry, this is eBay's fault.

[jo42]

As a occasional eBay user that posted an item last weekend, I can definitely say eBay is having problems.

1) Late last night, my listing and many others kept coming up as not being available.

2) Sometimes the description for a listing is shrunk down to half a visible line of text.

3) Sometimes the description for a listing is nothing empty space where you scroll down for three or four 'pages' only to find the eBay footer with nothing else, no place a bid button or whatever is usually at the bottom of a listing.

I've seen this on Firefox 3.5.2 and 3.5.3 after clearing all cache, cookies, whatever, then logging straight back into eBay.

IMO the eBay UI continues to suck even more. I can't believe no one has built anything to compete with them.

Though, the great deals from Hong Kong and China on various bits and bobs are definitely worth it. $5 including shipping for something that sells locally for $35 is worth the two week wait. $85 for an ARM9 development platform with LCD touch screen - gimme!

Re:Sorry, this is eBay's fault.

[Anonymous Coward]

<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="Wed, 19 Feb 2003 08:00:00 GMT"> <!-- or any other day in the past, place in all your pages-->

Yeah, but I keep my PC date as Sat, 1 Jun 1872. Your fix is broken make it work on my PC without me having to change anything!!!

Re:Sorry, this is eBay's fault.

[Johann Lau]

you are so utterly wrong. what you posted just specifies that the page expires at that date, it doesn't say anything about any linked elements. those send their own HTTP headers. speaking of that: never use META tags when you can send HTTP headers instead, and please just use "0" instead of making up dates in the past.

Re:Sorry, this is eBay's fault.

[commodoresloat]

yeah. and then give him the HTML pedant award.

Re:Sorry, this is eBay's fault.

[TheThiefMaster]

HTTP in fact.

Re:Sorry, this is eBay's fault.

[kchrist]

I attended a talk a few years ago given by one of the designers at Ebay. He stated categorically that Ebay does not do user testing, and that he personally doesn't feel it's useful.

Says it all, really.

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:bad plan

[schon]

ONe of the worst things that you can do as a company is blame the user/customer.

Really? It seems to work quite well for Microsoft. :)

Re:bad plan

[Shikaku]

WGA and piracy

Stopped using Ebay for selling/buying back in 2003

[Super Dave Osbourne]

Sold from 1999 to 2003, and got fed up with eBay and their ignoring feedback from users. Now they seem to have taken it seriously and still screwed up yet another revision (5 years plus in the making). Go eBay, e-i-e-i-o.

Nice comparison there...

[rm999]

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.

More business for Craigslist!!!

[Antique Geekmeister]

Excessive use of fragile and unreliable, non-standards-compliant Javascript? Check.
Excessive use of meaningless graphics, slowing browsing and usability but reducing the number of successful page changes by clients? Check.
Obvious uselessness for those with visual problems? Check.
Unnecessary re-arrangement of straightforward design to force a "new paradigm" as part of some advertising exec's "new vision"? Check.
No improvement in user experience or actual usable features added? Check.
Disable current generation of sniping tools, forcing them to hire engineers for at least 30 minutes work to update their clients? Check.

Driving people to the plain-text, plain-language, you can even rent cheap hookers there traffic of Craigslist? Check.

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.

Re:Javascript's the problem, not the solution

[QuoteMstr]

The amount of snake oil and outright fraud in web site services (including development) is truly phenomenal. We haven't seen these levels of sleaze since the era of patent medicines and dubious sausages at the end of the 19th century. Not even the financial industry is this filthy. At least in that case, people died, which spurred government to regulate the hell out of industry. Will we finally see some professional accreditation in the software (including web!) development world?

Re:Javascript's the problem, not the solution

[Dogtanian]

At least in that case, people died

So you're actually saying it would be better if crappy JavaScript caused people to die??!

Sounds familiar

[SilverHatHacker]

Javascript causes a new interface to act up, be unreliable and unpredictable on all browsers across all platforms? Now where have I heard that before?
;)

Re:broken by design

[unlametheweak]

broken by design

No, people need to adapt to the technology. As technology gets better and smarter, people need to change their way of thinking and become better and smarter themselves in order to use this much more complicated technology. The Chinese had the write philosophy by sculpting the foot to fit the shoe.

Don't argue with customer service. There's a saying in the industry; "Customer service is always right". Don't argue with the people who are paid to help you. Listen to your superiors and clear your cache instead of complaining, because complainers generally tend to get hung-up on and ignored.

This can't be ebay's falt....

[McFortner]

Their new layout has a 100% feedback and hundreds of people have it as "A++++++++++++++!!!"

This doesn't surprise me at all...

[whydna]

I went to a presentation a few years ago by a pair of eBay's senior engineers where they were discussing their architecture and technology. They explained their Java-on-Windows two-tier architecture (web front-ends which are handling all of the business logic, database backends, little-to-no caching, etc). They explained how they have pools of servers for handling different page types (i.e. search vs. gateway vs. help, etc) and how they sometimes have brownouts in some pools because they mis-predicted the number of servers they needed in that pool.

During the Q&A, somebody asked them, "what's the biggest challenge that you guys face?"; the response was "fitting enough information in the browser's cookie... 4k really isn't enough information for us". A follow-up question was asked about why they didn't just use a session-id key and store as much data as they want in a database or cache, etc. They basically admitted that they didn't have the technical strength to build something like that at their scale.

I asked them why they allow users to post JavaScript in their posts as it basically turns all of eBay into a cross-site scripting bug. I know for a fact that sellers have been able to include JS in their posts which can record the max-bid of the buyer. Sure, it's against the TOS, but only if they catch it. Their response was that it's what their customers (read sellers) want.

The point I'm getting to is that eBay, despite having one of the most popular websites in the world employs some bass-ackward technical solutions and business policies. What's reported in this doesn't surprise me at all.

Re:This doesn't surprise me at all...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not surprised. The good engineers left eBay a long, long time ago. I've seen so many eBay resumes and bios over the last few years, and nearly all of them were junk. The whole organization is so bloated, no one sees more than a small part of the operation, and their hires don't really require more than basic knowledge of java and web applications.

In previous years, you'd see a fair amount of coders with decent university degrees end up at eBay, but in the last 5 years, you see people even less impressive than Oracle hires (if that's possible). All the flotsam and jetsam of schools you've never heard of from countries all over the far side of the world, with long histories of short-duration jobs.

Around 2004-5, Yahoo hired many of their best people. More often than not, if you see a resume/bio that says someone worked at eBay for a few years, and then suddenly became a "Sr Eng Mgr" at Yahoo in those years, it means that they were above average coders whom Yahoo paid a lot to jump ship. Because of Yahoo salary guidelines, they had to give them fancy 2nd-tier management titles in order to pay them more than a certain amount.

Probably more than you wanted to know, but my opinion is that eBay staff jumped the technological shark a long time agao.

Re:This doesn't surprise me at all...

[MojoRilla]

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).

Re:This doesn't surprise me at all...

[Samgilljoy]

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.

Re:This doesn't surprise me at all...

[QuoteMstr]

Little-to-no caching is just crazy on eBay's part.

The problem with caching is cache coherency. For some applications, like a search engine or a classifieds listing site, that doesn't matter much. But because eBay's auctioning needs shared state for each product offered, and because that sharing needs to be immediate and precise (it's an auction, after all), there's not much that caching buys you.

Of course, the solution is to use partitioning to increase performance, since different products listed on eBay don't need to know about each other. But that's orthogonal to caching.

Re:This doesn't surprise me at all...

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually interviewed with eBay back in 2000 when they were trying to branch out into other countries. The problem was that their entire website was done with the original ASP design where everything was compiled into a massive DLL. All the English text for each page was hard-coded into it. In order to localize it into other languages, it took them over a month to translate and replace the text for each language. At the time I was interviewing, they had developed a crude method of localizing the code that involved replacing all the English strings with constants and then replacing them with the translated text and re-compiling. After all this, they had to have a team of QA people look at every page to make sure that nothing was broken, which it often was. It was a horrible process. I remember seeing pages on the US Ebay site show up in Spanish and now I know why.

The lead developer that I interviewed with had big plans for totally overhauling the whole thing. He wanted to separate the site structure from the content and use XSLT to merge translated content text stored in XML with the structure to generate the site. Using this sort of design would have allowed it to more easily scale to multiple languages and would allow a much faster turnaround on site changes. They were spending millions of dollars trying to get a foothold in Spain, Germany, Japan, etc... and having the foreign sites lag the US site by a month or more wasn't an option.

I was totally jazzed about what they wanted to do and I was willing to move 3000 miles cross-country for the job. Unfortunately, the management had it in their mind that they could get away with hiring a local recent college grad for 70K (or less). Keep in mind that eBay is located in San Jose. I looked at apartments within a 40 minute radius and the best I could find was 1 bedroom efficiencies for over 2000K a month. At the time, I had put together a spreadsheet with all my expected expenses and I determined that to live within driving distance of Ebay, I'd need about 90K annually (before taxes) just to break even financially. This doesn't include ANY saving or investing.

When I told them that I wanted 90K, they said that it wasn't possible, their budget was only for 70K. When I questioned them about how their developers can afford to live there on 70K, they said that many of their developers share apartments and expenses with one (or more) co-workers. One developer I spoke to told me that he takes the train 2 HOURS EACH WAY every day because he wanted to buy a house for his family and couldn't afford one near eBay. He said that they let him work on his laptop for part of the travel time, so he doesn't actually stay at work for 8 hours. It still sounds like a crappy life to me.

I have no idea whether they ever went ahead with the overhaul. I know at the time their solution to everything was to just throw tons of hardware at the problem instead of re-designing anything so that it was more efficient and scaled better.

Re:This doesn't surprise me at all...

[ThrowAwaySociety]

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

No, it doesn't. It sounds like a mediocre solution.

The proper solution is to replicate sessions across servers.

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:broken by design

[FatherDale]

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.

One CS rep's comments...

[Nakor BlueRider]

The comments given by one rep in customer service doesn't really equate to eBay as a company blaming users. Clearing cache and cookies is pretty much an eBay rep's cookie cutter response for any such problems, and if that doesn't work they try other things. Or it could be the rep was just bad, didn't get a memo, or that they hadn't filed a bug yet.

Trust me, I'm no fan of eBay, but I don't think it's valid to say the company is blaming users for the description errors based on that one rep's comment alone.

Re:broken by design

[unlametheweak]

And if eBay wants to continue to dominate the auction market...

That appears to be why large companies like eBay don't need to worry too much about quality (in customer service or otherwise). They'll react if and when they think they can increase their bonuses. Unfortunately there's always at least one layer of abstraction between a business practice and a balance sheet. The bean counters usually just react to spread sheet and database triggers (and all their assumptions).

These days it's best to grow your own food and barter with your neighbours. Money is for bankers.

Same story here...

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting AC to protect the innocent...

A few years ago my company's software (Windows/.NET-based) was in use by eBay for some functionality. They had some dedicated Windows boxes set up to run it. One time they had a problem with it, and getting even basic diagnostic information out them was impossible (even though they were escalating it as some big emergency).

The relationship ended after they decided they wanted to re-architect things and move our stuff closer to their back end. I was on the conference call when we had to explain to them that our .NET code wasn't going to run on their IBM AIX-based servers.

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.

eBay's UI *always* sucked

[Tablizer]

I complained to them about a year ago before the new design because you couldn't see stuff if your screen resolution was not high enough. They blew me off in a round-about way. Thus, this is not new.

I wish these websites would have a KISS Mode, where all the browser-busting eye-candy could be turned optionally off. And no, I don't mean these guys.
   

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

[mikeplokta]

PayPal most certainly is a bank. In Europe. If you want entities that hold your money to be regulated as banks in the US as well, then tell your Congressman, not Slashdot.

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:Always the same story

[syousef]

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.

Hahahaha. That's hilarious. Have you ever tried to settle a dispute with a seller as a buyer? The hoops you have to jump through are in my view ridiculous ESPECIALLY when you use Paypal. I closed my Paypal account years ago after I had an issue with an item that had obviously been soiled, broken, repackaged and re-shrink-wrapped. They'd only look into it if i had an expert on the item write a letter on a company letter head, and if I'd just fax that internationally. Yeah for a $28 item which I had already sent back, I'm going to spend time and money finding an expert when there was no expertise required in working out that it was a broken, soiled, repackaged piece of crud. But technically they were honouring their obligation and protecting my purchase. Meanwhile the seller threatened to call in police and lawyers because I left feedback that he claimed was defaming him. (Paypal feedback is a joke). Then he tried to pressure me to use a mediation service that was in my opinion completely biased against me.

Ebay and Paypal make it hard for everyone but Ebay and Paypal. The blame lies elsewhere. They're not fussy about on whom. If you're a crook you can game the system as either buyer or seller. Not to mention the bargains dried up long ago. In fact I stopped buying things on Ebay years ago. I feel like every purchase is a bad gamble.

Re:Always the same story

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you thought that maybe both are true ?
Ebay tells the seller "You're in the wrong, we're taking the money back"
Then Ebay tells the buyer "Tough. You're in the wrong. Money gone."
Profit !

Re:Always the same story

[shaitand]

I have had similar experience to the GP with regards to refunds and replacements. Most sellers use a scam system and charge excessive shipping as well and then refund minus shipping charges. If the product is damaged they want you to pay to ship it back. Nevermind that they just sent you broken merchandise. At this point they should be sending me a replacement AND a refund or at least humoring me with a free bozo button or something for the inconvenience of being sent a broken widget.

The real scam is in the feedback department. In a transaction the buyer has one obligation, to pay. A seller on the hand not only has to deliver, they have to sell a quality product, communicate, ship promptly, take full responsibility for faulty merchandise and shipping problems. Ebay sellers would manipulate the system by withholding feedback after buyers had paid and use it to retaliate against anyone who left them negative feedback.

Re:Always the same story

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

Let me guess. You used to hold feedback hostage until you received positive feedback from the buyer. If they gave you positive feedback, you'd leave them positive. Maybe. If they left neutral, you'd leave them negative. If they left you negative, you damned their mother and left them negative feedback.

The buyer has one responsibility. Paying. Once they pay you leave positive feedback. Schmuck. Good riddance to you.

Ebay SCAM

[Anonymous Coward]

Years ago, I had an ebay account with two negative feedbacks. Instead of trying to get them removed, I just opened a new accout. My new account was in excellent standing for more than 3 year and I was a platinum power seller. I was given an ebay account manager along with a paypal manager because of the monthly volume I was selling. One day, my platinum power seller account was closed and I called to see why. My manager said that my powerseller account had been linked to my first account, which was not in good standing and was closed by ebay. It takes ebay 3 years to link accounts? I've had the same address and IP address for the past 15 years. I asked what I had to do in order to reopen my powerseller account and I was told by my ebay manager, that I had to resolve the 2 negative feedbacks on my original account (which was more than 4 years old by this point). I managed to log into my original account with my managers help (because I no longer used that email address associated w/the original account). Once I logged into my original account, I emailed both buyers and asked if they would be willing to remove their negative feedbacks. Both customers agreed. Both customers left negative feedback because they felt as though they overpaid. I offered to give them $100 each to make things right. I called my ebay manager back and told him both buyers would remove their negative feedbacks, which he told me, would put my original account back in good standing, which would re-open my powerseller account. The following day, my ebay manager called me and said too much time had passed for me to resolve these feedbacks and ebay would not allow my customers to remove them. I appealed this all the way up to the office of the president and got nowhere. I will join any class action lawsuit out there in an effort to get reinstated on ebay. My customers always recd their merchandise. I paid over 5k per month just in ebay listing/selling fees. That should tell you the volume I was doing. This doesnâ(TM)t include the fees I paid each month to paypal, which of course, Iâ(TM)m banned from them to.

Re:Ebay SCAM

[TheThiefMaster]

Two negative feedbacks? That doesn't sound like much. I've bought from sellers with more negative feedback than that, like this person: http://feedback.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewFeedback2&userid=omar.m786&ftab=AllFeedback

Makes your story seem fishy.

Re:broken by design

[Tubal-Cain]

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.

Rather than check what the retail price is, some people just expect the bidding to stop at or near that price. So when you have two or more of these people after the same item, each keeps expecting that the other person will stop at or near the appropriate price.

Re:broken by design

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Mod parent up

[argent]

I have been finding it harder and harder to avoid being thrown willy-nilly into the new Slashdot beta interface. For a while I was getting half-beta half-vanilla, until I complained on another forum and it got to a slashdot developer that way.

Now I'm finding that links to articles from comment pages take you to a different URL which always shows a "rich" interface whether you have it enabled or not.

Slashdot... dump the beta, and drop the fancy user interface. You're better off without it.

Fleeing "Power Sellers"? I'm OK with that.

[Frosty Piss]

Power Sellers have dropped by the thousands, including myself...

I'm OK with that. "Power Sellers" bury individual "real people" sellers with their flood, no, tsunami of Chinese crap drop shipped from the same distributers... A lot of the same shrink wrapped crap-ola found in discount malls, flea markets, state fairs... Wal-Mart - you get the idea, not real auctions, mostly "Buy It Now" crap. In other words, all the stuff that makes eBay worthless and hard to find the real stuff.

the sad truth

[rakslice]

In many organizations the size of eBay, the front line support staff has more of a chance of having the pope over for dinner than they have getting specs for their company's software changed to incorporate user feedback. All they can do is accept the software, broken-as-designed and all, and help users work around or cope with the brokenness.

Re:CraigsList Keeps It Simple. Shame Slashdot Does

[dangitman]

I've never had a problem loading the site or having it work incorrectly,

Most of use don't have a problem getting slashdot to work incorrectly, it's true. However, having it work correctly would be more desirable.

Re:broken by design

[Compuser]

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.

Compare it with oil, people eventually snap

[greg_robson]

We use petrol-based cars by habit, but in the UK when it last peaked at £1.20 it was noticable how people were driving less. If you applied eBay's price hikes to the petrol industry I believe you would see increasing demand for LPG/electric alternatives (even public transport if they can put up with the crowding).

A loyal customer base today is no guarantee for a loyal customer base tomorrow. They must remember to innovate well, you can go too far in the wrong direction: Delorean got it wrong with the car!

Re:broken by design

[antime]

Indeed. For some reason the hot new trend in shit website design is hiding information behind tabs or even better, hidden tabs. For a prime example of this, see Sourceforge. Every time they have redesigned the site they have made it more difficult to use, primarily by hiding all the relevant information in increasingly complex ways. Originally all the relevant info was on one big page and the functionality was in easy and simple menus. In the next design they put all the info in a small box so you couldn't see it all at once but had to scroll the contents and in the current design you can't fucking find anything.

Re:broken by design

[lockestep]

If I want to buy a used refrigerator, I'd use Craigslist. If I want to buy anything used that can be shipped at a reasonable cost, I'll look at Ebay. Example: I just tried "IPod Nano" on Ebay, and got over 33,000 listings. I did the same for Craigslist, and found 102 on the page for my closest city. Add the inconvenience of trying to deal with individuals (who may have already sold the item, and who might eventually respond to your email), and the wait time involved while arranging a form of payment, and you have an easy default back to Ebay.

Re:broken by design

[cayenne8]

"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."

While I agree with your thoughts on the site re-design (why can they not just let a good, fast loading, simple interface be?)...I don't get this comment.

The difference is, you buy NEW items on Amazon.com, and get a deal on USED items (sometimes, things not even manufactured anymore like old McIntosh tube amps I'm looking for) on eBay.

Any idiot that pays retail price for something on eBay is well.....a sucker, and there is one born every minute.

:)

Re:broken by design

[rs79]

Try using only Opera and using ebay. It's a joke, you'll find huge white spaces as though there were 25 "pages" in this one page. And the page is twice as wide as the actual screen is.

It's been this way for almost a year and now I guess other poeple are seeing the same nonsense.

30% of the time when I try a website that's new to me I end up saying to myself "haven't people actually tried this"

Re:What's with the bloody clearing?

[erroneus]

As a rule, when the developer places the requirement of doing any sort of maintenance or upkeep on the user, it is a bad thing.

I remember when "HTML" was just a markup language as the name stated. But people saw the word "language" and immediately thought it was programming. Far from it. It was for formatting. Clearly, that's not the case today and web programming really IS programming.

The whole of information technology has grown without any real requirements for degrees or certifications or the like. It's a good thing and it's a bad thing... it wouldn't be a bad thing if people cared about the quality, completeness or compatibility of their work, but too often that is not the case. This reminds of of the old days when anyone could be a dentist.

Re:I had an idea for an ebay competitor

[kchrist]

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.

Business problem, not tech problem

[nicolaiplum]

This is not a technology problem. This is a business problem. If you are running a shopfront, online or offline, in a competitive marketplace, you need to make it as accessible as possible to all the customers you want. For eBay, that is "everyone" (for a hot-dog stand, it is also "everyone"; for a Rolex dealer, it's only people who can afford a Rolex). The higher you make the barrier to entry, the fewer customers you will have.
Now if you're a person wanting a partner to sell your stuff with, do you want the stupid partner, or the smart one?
If you're a customer wanting to buy, do you use the easy website that works, or the one that doesn't work right? What incentive is there for you to use the hard-to-use site?
eBay thinks they have incentives (product range, large base of existing users, etc) to overcome these things. They may be right. They could be wrong. It's their business choice to make it work less well for some people. If they are unable to make it both work better for some people and well enough for others, they may have a serious business problem; if they choose to make it better for some people and worse for others, that's a courageous business choice. If it makes them, or their sellers, less money, it's stupid.