The “Break it Down” Blog

Caution: Venting ahead…

I’ve been eBaying on and off for about 10 years, and as I’ve gotten older and grumpier I’ve noticed more things about more pieces of software and hardware pertaining to usability that have gone from not noticing them, to absolute rage-induced comas brought on by the stupidity required for such design decisions to be made.

Recently I’ve been trying to clear out some old stuff from the house and using eBay a lot and am reminded every single day how mind-numbling poor this entire service and infrastructure is. I think eBay has made it’s position abundently clear over the years to the users what their view on improvements are: as long as it’s not effecting our profit margins, fuck off.

A few things that drive me utterly crazy with eBay:

• JavaScript is used in 2 of the more useless screens (category selection) but then use *no where* else in the site. So obviously it’s required otherwise you could never select your categories, but then none of the other screens that would benefit from it so much, I would almost call it requied, use it.
• Messages have no connection to the “Message Center” in “My eBay”… if you click the ‘Respond’ button in your email when someone sends you an email, or you click ‘Respond’ next to the auction under My eBay or you click the message itself in the message center, all 3 of these actions have different results and the system is not aware of any of them except reading the message directly from the message center, so the message stays ‘unread’… that’s adorable
• Revising items: there is absolutely no indication of what you can/can’t revise at the different stages of an auction, you simply don’t see the item you are looking for even though the previous page describes what can be changed. For example “Click here to change shipping”, so you click there, and the page only shows you 3 payment options instead of the entire page and a half of shipping options
• Shipping configuration: When setting up shipping, you select the carrier, where you live and then where you are willing to ship to… Europe, Worldwide, Asia, etc. Naturally, these options mean nothing. You actually need to keep scrolling down under “International Shipping” and add shipping definitions to send packages internationally, all of which have that same damn stupid set of check boxes that mean nothing.
• When you are calculating shipping on an item you can of course click “change” for the country, at which point only 1 option is shown in the drop down with no indication as to why it’s only one, how to change it to international or any information pertaining to shipping.
• When entering custom weights or dimensions on an item, the dropdown with the weight and size stay on their default settings, you figure there could either be JavaScript to set these to “Custom” or at the least the backend processor could ignore the defaults after seeing you entered custom settings, naturally this is not the case. Your custom settings are completely ignored. So when you go to sell that 400lbs piano and forget to set the size and weight to ‘Custom’ and accidentally leave it on 2-3lbs, have fun with that shipping calculation after the auction is over.

So far I would have to say I’ve never been this annoyed with a service online before, it’s not just lack of services or buggy service, but the absolute and utter disregard of a usable service to the point that it’s shoved in your face over and over and over again “Hey look, we make billions of dollars a year off of you morons, and we don’t have to do a damn thing to entice you to stay our customers”.

This is the part where some competator steps in and then guess what happens in 6 months? Oh my gosh, what a shock, eBay rolls out a refined user interface that wasn’t written by the blind. Until then, does anyone have any suggestions for an alternative/popular online auction site?