This is something of a rant with an emotional element to it, but I'm hoping that maybe someone will hear it and put it to some kind of use. I want to thank people for being patient with me. Also, my experience may be specific to the Android app, as that's what I have available.
I started using Ebay soon after making a gender transition while frankly homeless (i.e. poor) and insecure with shopping in person. After some practice and some learning experiences, I got to where I could find anything I wanted on Ebay.
Black leather evening jacket with ruffles? No problem. Lace dress with nice big v neck and some flare. It was all very easy to find. More importantly, though, I was able to find things that I couldn't get anywhere else, like women's shoes in a wide size at a price that I could afford. The average price of women's shoes for someone like me is probably less than half what I would pay at Zappos.
But Ebay's app is consistently making life harder and harder for me. I can no longer find some essential filters like "shoe width" in the boots section without selecting other filters that I explicitly don't want beforehand. I NEED that filter to shop for shoes.
I'm getting ready for a job interview now, and I saw a cute look idea with a conservative polka dot blouse. I can't search for that anymore, I learned. Not only must I explicitly select "blouses" from the women's tops section (I'd much, much rather search all tops and see if anything unique piques my interest), but when I select blouses, the "pattern" option is missing. I have tried digging through the maze of filters, but the sheer number that I must select before the "pattern" filter emerges makes the search useless. Instead, my choices are between such useless things as "season" (which vendors rarely seem to list appropriately or at all) and "theme." How has this gotten to the point where I can't even search for a top with a pattern?
The worst part is that the Metadata exists. If Ebay would just add and "extra options" drop down I could make do!
I've had similar experiences trying to find clothing of a certain material. I don't know how to work around this at this point. Never-ending Ebay's other odd design choices, such as making the vertical scroll slider so small against the edge of the display that I can't even grab it with my stylus or that I can't skip to a certain brand by typing it in somewhere. These design choices seem to literally have no workaround. It's frustrating, and it's excluding me from business that I would otherwise be doing with ebay.
