eBay Denies New Design Is Broken, Blames Users 362
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.'"
broken by design (Score:1, Insightful)
broken by design
Of course they say that (Score:3, Insightful)
I get that a lot with hotmail (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Lack of standards. (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
bad plan (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Nice comparison there... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lack of standards. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Javascript's the problem, not the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Does it matter whose fault it is? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Lack of standards. (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps it's my geeky-nerdiness, but "function first, flash second. if flash compromises function, remove the flash."
Re:Sorry, this is eBay's fault. (Score:2, Insightful)
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:broken by design (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sorry, this is eBay's fault. (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually the code is serious and it does work. And no it won't clear the cache. It just won't use any cached items from February 19th, 2003 or before which is effectively forcing it to redownload everything.
One CS rep's comments... (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lack of standards. (Score:1, Insightful)
I mean how hard is it to make sure your hammer does its job? there's no quality control in that
Spoken like somebody who has no idea how manufacturing works.
Re:Lack of standards. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:broken by design (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lack of standards. (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Does it matter whose fault it is? (Score:5, Insightful)
"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:Lack of standards. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yup. Slashcode is an excellent example of this. [sigh]
Re:This doesn't surprise me at all... (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Lack of standards. (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Sorry, this is eBay's fault. (Score:2, Insightful)
<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:Lack of standards. (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is not a lack of standards. The problem is failing to follow standards.
Always the same story (Score:5, Insightful)
.
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 [43things.com]
http://www.screw-paypal.com/paypal_lawsuits.html [screw-paypal.com]
Re:Of course they say that (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Lack of standards. (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you punish a monopoly like eBay?
Sell/Buy on craigslist.
Re:Lack of standards. (Score:3, Insightful)
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:broken by design (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Of course they say that (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Always the same story (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Mod parent up (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:This doesn't surprise me at all... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] .
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:Lack of standards. (Score:4, Insightful)
Fleeing "Power Sellers"? I'm OK with that. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lack of standards. (Score:4, Insightful)
That scares me.
Hmm. I have a different opinion.
a technical institute that does provide a BA in web design.
That scares me.
the sad truth (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Javascript's the problem, not the solution (Score:3, Insightful)
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:This doesn't surprise me at all... (Score:3, Insightful)
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:I get that a lot with hotmail (Score:3, Insightful)
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:broken by design (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What's with the bloody clearing? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Business problem, not tech problem (Score:3, Insightful)
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.