Change in eBay — Rant
Originally posted 2008-03-11 08:07:35. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
I like eBay. Lots. I use it often to buy many things for myself and others. Although I am not by any means an eBay junkie, it has become essential to my business.
About once a month I spend quality time on eBay looking at needlepoint stuff. Mostly to see what people are selling and to look for some of the more obscure things I like.
So imagine my surprise yesterday when I went to eBay and found that on the default page the entire method of searching for items had changed, to something which some idiot at eBay thought would be helpful.
I’ve got just one word for them NOT!
In the almost 30 years I have been searching for information and things on the computer I have never seen anything as actively hostile as the new stuff they are testing on eBay.
Here is a real life example. A few months ago I was planning a Bargello project, but I didn’t know what I wanted to make. So I went to eBay and looked for a fun self-finishing item.
Here’s my search path:
Crafts
Needlepoint
Other Needlepoint
and I had a reasonable number of items to view (well under 1000) and found the lovely checkbook cover I’ve blogged about. Since I view 200 items at a time, this didn’t take long to do.
But with the new system I could not have done that. I could click on Crafts and get well over 100,000 items. I could narrow it down to a paltry 7000 or so by entering “needlepoint”
That 7000+ includes:
plastic canvas items
thread
kits
books
canvases
finished needlepoint
and who knows what all else.
I can narrow down the list by excluding words, but I can only do it one word at a time. By doing this I eventually got down to 5300 items.
I looked through the first page, went to the second and found some new terms to exclude, but to remove them from the search, I had to go back to the first page and would need to do that for every term I found.
Even at 200 items per page, there’s over 100 pages to look through.
And this took me over an hour to do and I was so exhausted by this unfriendly process I looked through a bit more than 2 pages.
Did I find anything useful — No.
Could I find anything useful — Not bloody likely.
There are so many good user search experiences out there. If I go to amazon and put in the name of a record my DH wants I get several other good choices. If I like movie on Netflix, the next time I’ll see some others I might like. As computer technology has gotten more sophisticated, the ability to find great stuff and make it enjoyable has improved as well. With this new “search experience” eBay has concocted, I am not happy, I don’t find what I want and it wasn’t even easy to find something as simple as a denim skirt in my size (that took half an hour of fussing).
If this was a new site, I could maybe understand, but eBay worked well, it had a flexible search structure which could grow in any direction. I allowed for serendipity as well as targeted search. It was easy to use.
Now we have the Big Brother approach to shopping. Where eBay “knows” that if I’m looking for a dress I can choose easily from the five most popular sleeve lengths, but what if I wanted short sleeves (not on that list) and I wanted to see both 8′s and smalls and mediums. And knee-length and mid-calf, but not minis, or long.
You are talking multiple searches here and even then you might feel as if something was missing.
So I’m Mad, I’m Complaining, and I want you to too.
Go tothe page to send eBay an email – you will need to sign in first or log in as a guest.
Then tell them you don’t like their test structure. And tell your friends to complain as well.
As my DH says, that’s the beauty of capitalism, if people complain, they don’t make changes. If people don’t buy, then they make the changes (or in this case don’t make the changes) even faster.
BTW, they answered my complaint almost immediately. If you want the old system (but please do complain first), go tohttp://shop.ebay.com and say you want to opt out of the test.
But I’m still upset that I had to complain to find this out, that they made the change and that, as a company, they are so full of pride they think they “know” what people want and don’t give them an option to browse.
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
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Ha, ha, ha. This is NOT surprising. When companies think they know about their customers, they are usually WRONG. Ebay is getting a new president. Meg Whitman is stepping down. And there are a LOT of changes. So many that there was a seller boycott. And I can’t imagine that sellers are happy about the change that forbids them to rate buyers (even really bad ones). I haven’t used Ebay since Christmas, but I’ll send them a complaint.