A different post says I can turn on the old feature by "switch to old purchase history page" What are the instructions to perform this?
How old was that post? If it is not recent, the information is likely outdated.
This thread itself is over a year old, and the changes in eBay's purchase history since then have been incorporated into all current links to the purchase history page; any old links now point to the new page only or else are broken, as far as I can tell.
Likely eBay had some reason to make the change -- the new page probably loads faster without the external links, and eBay probably figures that the number of users that rely on tracking numbers appearing on the main page to distinguish multiple orders arriving the same day is quite small.
Some users have been working around the issue by adding tracking numbers or seller zip codes to a note that is displayed on the purchase history page -- at least for orders that are likely to be hard to distinguish from other orders, or else by finding a different way to identify those orders.
Use the "Tell us what you think" link in the upper right of the purchase history page to let eBay know what you think of the changes, though you should not be surprised if eBay fails to return to the old page or to incorporate those features to the current page after all this time.
