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

[NitroWolf]

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.

Works on my machine

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like the ebay customer service rep has met the requirements of the prestigious Works on my machine [codinghorror.com] certification program.

This doesn't surprise me at all...

[whydna]

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.

Re:Lack of standards.

[freedom_india]

Of course they would do.
If i were a tape player manufacturer, i would try to "enhance" the features by offering non-standard features: like LP recording (twice the capacity at half the speed, thus making it unplayable on any other system), etc.
The fact is that punishment is absent when you don't follow standards.
If Sony made a walkman that didn't hold a Tape, it can't advertise it could hold a Tape(false adverts) and the market would instantly punish it for it.
How do you punish a monopoly like eBay?

Re:This doesn't surprise me at all...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not surprised. The good engineers left eBay a long, long time ago. I've seen so many eBay resumes and bios over the last few years, and nearly all of them were junk. The whole organization is so bloated, no one sees more than a small part of the operation, and their hires don't really require more than basic knowledge of java and web applications.

In previous years, you'd see a fair amount of coders with decent university degrees end up at eBay, but in the last 5 years, you see people even less impressive than Oracle hires (if that's possible). All the flotsam and jetsam of schools you've never heard of from countries all over the far side of the world, with long histories of short-duration jobs.

Around 2004-5, Yahoo hired many of their best people. More often than not, if you see a resume/bio that says someone worked at eBay for a few years, and then suddenly became a "Sr Eng Mgr" at Yahoo in those years, it means that they were above average coders whom Yahoo paid a lot to jump ship. Because of Yahoo salary guidelines, they had to give them fancy 2nd-tier management titles in order to pay them more than a certain amount.

Probably more than you wanted to know, but my opinion is that eBay staff jumped the technological shark a long time agao.

Re:Sorry, this is eBay's fault.

[jo42]

As a occasional eBay user that posted an item last weekend, I can definitely say eBay is having problems.

1) Late last night, my listing and many others kept coming up as not being available.

2) Sometimes the description for a listing is shrunk down to half a visible line of text.

3) Sometimes the description for a listing is nothing empty space where you scroll down for three or four 'pages' only to find the eBay footer with nothing else, no place a bid button or whatever is usually at the bottom of a listing.

I've seen this on Firefox 3.5.2 and 3.5.3 after clearing all cache, cookies, whatever, then logging straight back into eBay.

IMO the eBay UI continues to suck even more. I can't believe no one has built anything to compete with them.

Though, the great deals from Hong Kong and China on various bits and bobs are definitely worth it. $5 including shipping for something that sells locally for $35 is worth the two week wait. $85 for an ARM9 development [ebay.com] platform with LCD touch screen - gimme!

eBay's UI *always* sucked

[Tablizer]

I complained to them about a year ago before the new design because you couldn't see stuff if your screen resolution was not high enough. They blew me off in a round-about way. Thus, this is not new.

I wish these websites would have a KISS Mode, where all the browser-busting eye-candy could be turned optionally off. And no, I don't mean these guys [wikipedia.org].
   

Ebay SCAM

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I get that a lot with hotmail

[Compholio]

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.

It's probably proxy caching (possibly browser caching). As a large website you're supposed to set the appropriate caching options, or "Cache-Control: no-cache" if you're lazy. That way when you update your pages/resources it actually takes effect. Alternatively, if you weren't forward thinking about such things you can rename the page/resource and that will force your clients to grab the new info.

Re:Lack of standards.

[denmarkw00t]

It never ceases to amaze me how many "professional" web developers can't even write a basic HTML and CSS page without a dozen+ errors and sheer semantic idiocy (like using tables for layout).

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.

Re:Always the same story

[syousef]

With eBay it's always the sellers' fault. Power Sellers have dropped by the thousands, including myself, because of eBay policies. Starting 1.5 to 2 years ago they decided it was time to screw sellers to make buyers happy.

Hahahaha. That's hilarious. Have you ever tried to settle a dispute with a seller as a buyer? The hoops you have to jump through are in my view ridiculous ESPECIALLY when you use Paypal. I closed my Paypal account years ago after I had an issue with an item that had obviously been soiled, broken, repackaged and re-shrink-wrapped. They'd only look into it if i had an expert on the item write a letter on a company letter head, and if I'd just fax that internationally. Yeah for a $28 item which I had already sent back, I'm going to spend time and money finding an expert when there was no expertise required in working out that it was a broken, soiled, repackaged piece of crud. But technically they were honouring their obligation and protecting my purchase. Meanwhile the seller threatened to call in police and lawyers because I left feedback that he claimed was defaming him. (Paypal feedback is a joke). Then he tried to pressure me to use a mediation service that was in my opinion completely biased against me.

Ebay and Paypal make it hard for everyone but Ebay and Paypal. The blame lies elsewhere. They're not fussy about on whom. If you're a crook you can game the system as either buyer or seller. Not to mention the bargains dried up long ago. In fact I stopped buying things on Ebay years ago. I feel like every purchase is a bad gamble.

Re:I get that a lot with hotmail

[QuoteMstr]

Or better yet, set resources to never expire, and instead incorporate a hash of the resource into the name of the resource. That way, clients can cache each resource forever, but will automatically get the new version when the resource changes.

Re:This doesn't surprise me at all...

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually interviewed with eBay back in 2000 when they were trying to branch out into other countries. The problem was that their entire website was done with the original ASP design where everything was compiled into a massive DLL. All the English text for each page was hard-coded into it. In order to localize it into other languages, it took them over a month to translate and replace the text for each language. At the time I was interviewing, they had developed a crude method of localizing the code that involved replacing all the English strings with constants and then replacing them with the translated text and re-compiling. After all this, they had to have a team of QA people look at every page to make sure that nothing was broken, which it often was. It was a horrible process. I remember seeing pages on the US Ebay site show up in Spanish and now I know why.

The lead developer that I interviewed with had big plans for totally overhauling the whole thing. He wanted to separate the site structure from the content and use XSLT to merge translated content text stored in XML with the structure to generate the site. Using this sort of design would have allowed it to more easily scale to multiple languages and would allow a much faster turnaround on site changes. They were spending millions of dollars trying to get a foothold in Spain, Germany, Japan, etc... and having the foreign sites lag the US site by a month or more wasn't an option.

I was totally jazzed about what they wanted to do and I was willing to move 3000 miles cross-country for the job. Unfortunately, the management had it in their mind that they could get away with hiring a local recent college grad for 70K (or less). Keep in mind that eBay is located in San Jose. I looked at apartments within a 40 minute radius and the best I could find was 1 bedroom efficiencies for over 2000K a month. At the time, I had put together a spreadsheet with all my expected expenses and I determined that to live within driving distance of Ebay, I'd need about 90K annually (before taxes) just to break even financially. This doesn't include ANY saving or investing.

When I told them that I wanted 90K, they said that it wasn't possible, their budget was only for 70K. When I questioned them about how their developers can afford to live there on 70K, they said that many of their developers share apartments and expenses with one (or more) co-workers. One developer I spoke to told me that he takes the train 2 HOURS EACH WAY every day because he wanted to buy a house for his family and couldn't afford one near eBay. He said that they let him work on his laptop for part of the travel time, so he doesn't actually stay at work for 8 hours. It still sounds like a crappy life to me.

I have no idea whether they ever went ahead with the overhaul. I know at the time their solution to everything was to just throw tons of hardware at the problem instead of re-designing anything so that it was more efficient and scaled better.

Re:I get that a lot with hotmail

[QuoteMstr]

Oh, of course. Plus, you need the server-side infrastructure to keep the hashes current and to ensure that everyone that refers to a given resource refers to the latest version. That doesn't come for free. Still, when the system works, it's elegant and quite efficient.

By the way: you don't necessarily need a content-length header. You can use chunked encoding [wikipedia.org] instead. If the script encounters an error, can you close the connection without sending the terminating chunk, which will (or at least should) cause browsers to act just like they'd received a bogus content-length header.

Re:I've had similar problems

[IamTheRealMike]

NoScript? I'll laugh if it turns out this problem is caused by NoScript or ad blockers. First rule of supporting a complex website - tell users to switch these tools off, clear their cache, cookies and try again (also, privacy proxies/porn filters)

No competent computer user likes to be told to do this routine sort of thing, but the unhappy fact is that there are a lot of people out there that are somewhere between total n00b and web expert, who use tools that screw around with website contents in flight and then can't figure out that it breaks things. I've had to clean up NoScript created messes before. The number of support complaints it created was amazing.

Re:broken by design

[antime]

Indeed. For some reason the hot new trend in shit website design is hiding information behind tabs or even better, hidden tabs. For a prime example of this, see Sourceforge. Every time they have redesigned the site they have made it more difficult to use, primarily by hiding all the relevant information in increasingly complex ways. Originally all the relevant info was on one big page and the functionality was in easy and simple menus. In the next design they put all the info in a small box so you couldn't see it all at once but had to scroll the contents and in the current design you can't fucking find anything.

Re:Always the same story

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you thought that maybe both are true ?
Ebay tells the seller "You're in the wrong, we're taking the money back"
Then Ebay tells the buyer "Tough. You're in the wrong. Money gone."
Profit !

Re:Ebay SCAM

[TheThiefMaster]

Two negative feedbacks? That doesn't sound like much. I've bought from sellers with more negative feedback than that, like this person: http://feedback.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewFeedback2&userid=omar.m786&ftab=AllFeedback [ebay.co.uk]

Makes your story seem fishy.

Re:Javascript's the problem, not the solution

[Dogtanian]

At least in that case, people died

So you're actually saying it would be better if crappy JavaScript caused people to die??!

Re:Always the same story

[shaitand]

I have had similar experience to the GP with regards to refunds and replacements. Most sellers use a scam system and charge excessive shipping as well and then refund minus shipping charges. If the product is damaged they want you to pay to ship it back. Nevermind that they just sent you broken merchandise. At this point they should be sending me a replacement AND a refund or at least humoring me with a free bozo button or something for the inconvenience of being sent a broken widget.

The real scam is in the feedback department. In a transaction the buyer has one obligation, to pay. A seller on the hand not only has to deliver, they have to sell a quality product, communicate, ship promptly, take full responsibility for faulty merchandise and shipping problems. Ebay sellers would manipulate the system by withholding feedback after buyers had paid and use it to retaliate against anyone who left them negative feedback.

Re:Lack of standards.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the time, form and function can co-exist very well. It's just that eBay's developers are too lazy/incompetent to do it right, like the majority of web designers/developers.

It never ceases to amaze me how many "professional" web developers can't even write a basic HTML and CSS page without a dozen+ errors and sheer semantic idiocy (like using tables for layout).

In a perfect world, all of us would be able to NOT use tables for layout... but with some designs, that just simply is not possible, and at least 1 has to be used (because of the difference of the behavior of tables vs. divs, no matter what CSS rules are applied). And I'm talking about cross-browser compatibility here (IE6 included) without tons of maintenance.

Re:broken by design

[cayenne8]

"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."

While I agree with your thoughts on the site re-design (why can they not just let a good, fast loading, simple interface be?)...I don't get this comment.

The difference is, you buy NEW items on Amazon.com, and get a deal on USED items (sometimes, things not even manufactured anymore like old McIntosh tube amps I'm looking for) on eBay.

Any idiot that pays retail price for something on eBay is well.....a sucker, and there is one born every minute.

:)

Re:broken by design

[rs79]

Try using only Opera and using ebay. It's a joke, you'll find huge white spaces as though there were 25 "pages" in this one page. And the page is twice as wide as the actual screen is.

It's been this way for almost a year and now I guess other poeple are seeing the same nonsense.

30% of the time when I try a website that's new to me I end up saying to myself "haven't people actually tried this"

Re:Always the same story

[Anonymous Coward]

> Power Sellers have dropped by the thousands, including myself, because of eBay policies.
> Starting 1.5 to 2 years ago they decided it was time to screw sellers to make buyers happy.

Let me guess. You used to hold feedback hostage until you received positive feedback from the buyer. If they gave you positive feedback, you'd leave them positive. Maybe. If they left neutral, you'd leave them negative. If they left you negative, you damned their mother and left them negative feedback.

The buyer has one responsibility. Paying. Once they pay you leave positive feedback. Schmuck. Good riddance to you.