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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.'"
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Their new layout has a 100% feedback and hundreds of people have it as "A++++++++++++++!!!"
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
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.
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]
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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
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.
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
>>>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.)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.