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eBay Blog

You'll never get this from eBay (well, unless you have a laptop with wireless access and go hiking): "Every pen and accessory sends its little jolt of memory through my system. Another flea market in Brimfield, a hot July in the 'gold rush' summer after the Hunt Brothers tried to corner the silver market and the trove of Swans that came out of it. The icy, unheated junk shop in Wolcott, Conn., between Christmas and New Year's Day and the sterling ripoussi, overfeed Franklin I found there."

• 17) It pisses me off that they don't put a thumbnail in the search results unless the seller pays them to. Looking at it from a pure usability vantage, buyers always want to see the thumbnails if any photo is available. Capitalist scum.
• 16) Ever more proof that colors are rarely used well when it comes to showing an ordering (e.g.: A < B < C).
• 15) It amazes me that they make it so difficult to pay them. Like, on the invoice results page, there isn't just a direct link to the various payment methods. I get to the CC entry page and it doesn't automatically have the amount I owe them, either. Then after I use the link on the CC payment page to see my invoice again, and try to submit the CC payment, it clears the CC data and asks me to re-enter it. I'm surprised they ever get any money at all from anybody ever. So much for competition and evolution.
• 14) The UI for editing something you are selling is sorta horrible; I go to my item, I click on "Manage your listing" and then I go through a couple different pages - each which opens a new browser window automatically on its own, which sorta sucks - and then get to a page for editing my item, only it is asking me to type in the item number. Why the heck couldn't it just remember the stupid item number all along, since that is where I started from?! Sheesh.
• 13) "Uncheck if you do not want to send a copy of this email to yourself." Could the UI folks try to be more obtuse, please? Sheezuz. What planet am I on?
• 12) When you are reviewing the bid you want to place, you might have to enter your userid and password. There is a little checkbox at the bottom which says "Remember my user ID and password for bidding." It is checked. Well, I don't want it checked, so I uncheck it before submitting. Of course, the next thing I go bid on has it checked again. I hate stuff like that.
• 11) When you get the list of search results, it tells you the date and time of when the auction ends. Then, when you go to a details page for a particular auction, you get to see how long until it ends, like "2days, 10 mins". The latter is a hell of a lot more useful to me, so I wish I could just always get that format even in the search results list. Blah.
• 10) It pisses me off that I can't see the results of multiple searches at once.
• 9) "1 days, 0 hours +", I kid you not.
• 8) Could their search suck any harder? I want to be able to exclude certain sellers, but there doesn't appear to be a means of doing that. Whatever. Jerks.
• 7) Why don't http connections to ebay.com just resolve to the same thing as www.ebay.com? Why, instead, do they put up a stupid page that waits a couple of seconds before redirecting you? Oh, the hate.
• 6) There was an auction I was bidding on. My limit was $75. I saw that the current top bid was $75. I decided I was willing to go up to $79, and I was afraid that someone else would bid like $76 in the last minute and win. So I went ahead and bid $79, figuring that the system would be smart enough to just raise my autobid limit and leave my $75 alone. Instead, it decided that I wanted to outbid myself. At the end of the auction the bid history shows my 2 bids, one right on top of the other, from $75 to $76. This is insane.
• 5) So they try to allow for different currencies. Well, they seem to screw it up in interesting ways fairly often:
  1. They sometimes don't recognize a price as being in a foreign currency; when you see the one-line entry on the search results page you see it in US $ but then on the details page it is in like British Pounds?!
  2. They get all fancy with the comma-vs-period notation differences. So they show the DM value with commas, and then right next to it they show an approximate value in US $, but they use the comma again rather than the proper decimal!
• 4) Here's a brilliant error message from the site:
  Item number not valid
  Sorry, the item number you entered, XXXX, either does not exist or does not apply to a completed transaction between <you> and <them>. Please go back and enter a valid item number to leave your transaction-related feedback comment.
  You may also receive this message if you have already left a feedback comment for the same user with the same item number.
  Like it would be so hard to check to see which it actually is? What completely freakin' brain-dead dorks.
• 3) Just finding the Contact Customer Support page is a world of frustration unto itself. (I was going to make you look for it yourself, but I'll be nice.) It is almost as if they wanted to make sure you were really unlikely to ever find it and thus be able to bother them.
• 2) The search functionality is utter crap. Like, huge and utter crap. Realize just how much stuff there is on ebay - you'd think decent search functionality would be totally required to keep them from going out of business, but so much for the free market.
  1. You can't restrict your search by currency. Do I really give a flying good goddamn about things in the UK? No. No, I do not.
  2. Realize that the only way you can find things on ebay is by a loose keyword search on the title of the auction, or on the body of the auction. They don't give sellers any sorts of forms for entering their items, so when you are searching for, say, DEC Alpha computers that are 500 MHz and above, you are screwed since there is no way to say 'where MHz >= 500'.
  3. So then you are restricted to just being able to search the title and body. You'd think, or at least I'd think, that it is pretty important for the search to give you fuzzy match options. For example, if you are searching for a copy of the movie Logan's Run, you have to hope that the sellers put the apostropohe in, or you have to do a couple of searches; one with and one without the apostrophe. Also, if you are looking for an item that could be pluralized, you are equally screwed.
  4. There are so-called advanced searches available where you can search by date ranges, seller id, yadda yadda yadda, but they are all segregated. So you cannot search by title and seller id simultaneously. So there's some guy selling lots of video game stuff, and I can't restrict it to just Sega Saturn items. I have to wade through the other ten pages of results to find the ones I want, which would fit on just one page of hits.
• 1) Don't put extraneous crap in forms that will only drive me nuts when I'm trying to use Tab to move through it. In other words, move the links and crap outside of the form, at the bottom, and keep the form itself at the top of the page. That way, it will probably all fit in the browser window space when I first get to the page and I won't have to try and scroll around or hit tab a hundred times! This is extra super annoying when it's a form you have to fill all the time.