New Saved Searches page

[private5230]

I just got a load of the new saved searches page and I have to say ebay has outdone itself on this one - what a horrible design and complete mess!   It looks like a page for idiots.   Why do they feel the need to change things that are just fine the way they are?  I actually deleted all of my saved searches because I cannot stand looking at that mess.  Ebay is slowly losing me as a user - really been going downhill for the past several years now.

[carbking]

I am thinking about sending them an invoice for the additional time it now takes to buy anything. Sellers will need to lower prices to compensate

[eburtonlab]

When they first introduced the saved search feature, you could actually give it a meaningful name and that is what you saw, not a complex string of search commands.

It is still possible to name a search using the eBay app.

[mr_lincoln]

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@private5230 wrote:

I just got a load of the new saved searches page and I have to say ebay has outdone itself on this one - what a horrible design and complete mess!   It looks like a page for idiots.   Why do they feel the need to change things that are just fine the way they are?  I actually deleted all of my saved searches because I cannot stand looking at that mess.  Ebay is slowly losing me as a user - really been going downhill for the past several years now.

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@private5230   That's got to be frustrating ... I knowing doing Sold search from a selling aspect has been a challenge too ...

[lavenderdelights]

I am in total agreement!  eBay:  CHANGE IT BACK.

[ebaaydave]

Thanks, that's usable once you have set up a search.  I have 100+ searches with probably 50+ active.  Yeah I'm into some obscure stuff  lol.

[paulight]

Agree 100%.  Maybe it is time to give up on eBay.  Their user interface continues to degrade instead of improving with time.  

The latest is brilliant.  What was missing for me was a giant picture of the item I was looking for even when the item does not match what I am looking for (this happens often).  You need to make it bigger so it takes up the entire screen and put a copy of the text string at the bottom - you know the one that I typed in describing the search category, but make the font really tiny so there will be more room for the really big and picture. 

And here is the really important part ...  make sure that there is no way to customize the "saved search" screen.  I hate having to make any choices.  It is so much easier when eBay makes the choices for me.  They know best.

[pell*hall]

Totally agree with all the above. 20 years on eBay and this is the first change that drove me to the comments.

1- Detailed searches are the place eBay shines in sorting through the vast buying options , so eBay is going to make them harder to use? Ever tried a detailed search on Amazon? Yecch!

2-The page designers have clearly never used the page, it's horrible for it's intended purpose

3-Removing display options was a mistake.

4-Over-riding saved display modes will never win in customer retention

Thanks to all who are working on a fix!

[chechem]

CHANGE IT BACK.  PLEASE CHANGE IT BACK.

[bongo-chick]

I'm also billing them the extra "pissing me off" charge. Then there's the **bleep**ing and handling surcharge which is a direct result of how stupid the change is.

[charlesm]

This is exactly my issue -- saved searches are useless unless the page displays complete plaintext of the search queries.

Totally useless now. 

[eburtonlab]

This is exactly my issue -- saved searches are useless unless the page displays complete plaintext of the search queries.

If you have many searches with similar keywords that you are having problems distinguishing now, you may want to consider rearranging your keywords to make those searches easier to tell apart.

Or, if you use the eBay app, you can re-save the search and give it an entirely new name.

[charlesm]

Sorry eburtonlab, that's not a realistic fix.

Firstly, I cannot easily find the specific search I want to edit because the plain text of the query itself is not visible. 

Secondly, what if the keywords cannot be meaningfully rearranged? Long, complex queries are usually long and complex for good reasons (mine are, at least).

There is no technical reason eBay cannot display the complete query as plain text. It would require almost no bandwidth, no additional server processing. There's no technical tradeoff at play here...

[book*and*violin]

Please give US the choice on how to view our list.

I don't want to see huge pictures, just my alphabetical list. This new format makes it almost impossible to quickly find the individual search I want.

Who picks which picture we see? Why does one seller get this "advantage"?

At least now the alpha choice sticks.

[eburtonlab]

Sorry eburtonlab, that's not a realistic fix.

It's not fix at all; it is a workaround.

Firstly, I cannot easily find the specific search I want to edit because the plain text of the query itself is not visible. 

Find all the searches that you cannot easily distinguish, and edit those so you can. If you can look at the truncated search terms and immediately know which search it is, you do not need to edit it. If you look at the search and you do not immediately know which search it is, that is a candidate for editing.

Secondly, what if the keywords cannot be meaningfully rearranged? Long, complex queries are usually long and complex for good reasons (mine are, at least).

Complex searches are the easiest to rearrange -- you have the most options that way. If you use parenthetical expressions in your search, put that at the beginning of your terms and add a unique label as the first term.

If you have a bunch of searches that all start with the following search terms:

(red,white,blue,yellow,green) (stripe,star,chevron)...

Then you can add a unique identifier to each search like this:

(zzUNIQUE123,red,white,blue,yellow,green) (stripe,star,chevron)...

If you choose your starting letters wisely, you can even get the searches to sort in a particular fashion to make things easier.

If your search has exclusion terms or quotes, you can add another unique exclusion term without changing the search results.

flag -zzUNIQUE123 -green -black -yellow -purple

Searches without exclusions, parentheticals or quotes are a little trickier, but you can change the keyword order to distinguish them. Or use capital letters in certain keywords to set them apart from others.

flag
Flag
fLag
flAg
flaG
FLag
fLAg
flAG

Or use the eBay app to save those searches and give each search a unique name.

There is no technical reason eBay cannot display the complete query as plain text. It would require almost no bandwidth, no additional server processing. There's no technical tradeoff at play here...

The fact that eBay could make a simple change that would make your life easier does not mean that eBay will actually make that change, no matter how much you and others want that to happen.

If on balance it makes your life easier to organize your saved searches, you should probably do that regardless of what eBay does, rather than waiting around for eBay to fix things and suffering with disorganized searches in the mean time.

Yes, it is annoying to have to make extra effort to make things usable again after eBay replaces a functioning page with a less functional new page, but if making searches usable again is valuable enough you should probably do it.

And if that is too much effort, there are other ways to save searches besides using eBay's Saved Searches page, such as by using bookmarks. If you use bookmarks, there is no limit to how many searches you can save, or how you can name them. You can organize them in different folders, put them on your browser toolbar, open all the searches in a folder at once in different tabs, and share them between devices, all without relying on eBay to support one particular page in a particular way.

Should eBay fix the page to make it more usable? Sure.

Will eBay fix the page? Dunno.

Am I holding my breath waiting for eBay to fix it? Nope.

[fordcollector6]

Well, I have read the list of replies in this topic, and while the suggestion(s) on how to change the saved searches (and others) landing page(s) might work, they are past my skill set, and I am fairly sure that it will cause/create some kind of other unfix-able problem, if I was to try it.

That being said, I think it will/would be easier to just save each searched item's page as a bookmark (favorite). So with that I created a specific folder in which, after going thru my searches and opening each of them in a new tab, I saved each of them to that folder in the sequence that I wanted.

It is simple enough for me to use and I won't have to go to my main summary landing page, or any other of my landing pages that this platform offers.

That's my 2 cent fix on this.