Tech issues + multiple problems

[starla333]

Hello  E bay,

  This letter of advice and complaints is mainly about the " purchase history ", and the buying  experience on E bay.

  I have given both earned compliments to you over the years, and useful advice about things that were not great, all for the sake of being helpful, and hopefully having the ease of buying on E bay to be easy and fun...  as often as possible.

  Just so you know where I am coming from with my strong advice, I will say that I am a former, and now freelance, corporate consultant. I would like to get paid for for advice, so I'll leave that up to you if you choose to honor me with that. Thanks for considering it.  I am also a Therapist of the Healing Arts, which will be handy later on in this letter

( you'll see ).

  On Ebay, we purchase items for my jewelry and art business that is run by a group of us artists. Most of our buying is from China and Asian countries since they have items we can't find anywhere else.

  I've called and verbalized both good and bad experiences about E bay "buying" that is about sellers, post office, and E bay itself, particularly the page layout and functions.

  I know it's a lot of work to create functional pages, yet you want our feedback, so here it is.

              The Purchase History pages...

1. We buy a lot of items, and therefore, we have a lot of items in our main history list that have a delivery date and tracking number. We rely on that tracking number to be there so when items are delivered, we can put a few of the mailer numbers in our " FIND " search box, and find the item so much faster compared to going up and down each page trying to match the item with the image  ( which is a lousy chore to do it that way ).

  On the Asian mailers, the only way to locate the item is thru a tracking number, rather than by the picture of the item which doesn't always match.

  Not all sellers add a tracking no. which means we have to labor to locate them with their image.

1. - The old Purchase History vs the newer Purchase History  pages...

  When you first created the " new Purchase History " program... we felt we were shanghaied, and, boy, was I ever **bleep** off on how restrictive it was, until days later when I found that you nonchalantly gave the choice of switching to the old history regime, way up in the right hand corner.... you should have made an effort to let us know about that choice...

 just put it in large red font or something.  You need to make it easy for us, which is a talent in of itself which is what I do in our business, so I know, it takes effort to thing that way.  Here's what I mean...

  When I make changes in our business, I go out of my way to make it easy, user friendly, and clear to make it easy on customers.  Their minds are in another place, so I have to think from their perspective... and I can report that it works.

 Those are rules I learned in movie script writing, and it's also a rule in court of being clear and easy.

 I got on E bay yesterday to find that the new history page came up without the choice to switch to the old one.

 Today, it's still there, and I have items I need to find.  Here's why the new history does not work...

  a - the tracking number is hidden in the menu, so we can't " search and find " an item via the mailer track no. on any of our pages, which was so convenient in the old history.

  b - the feedback button is also hidden in the menu, which means we are not going to leave feedback because it's now an extra step to go find it.. and we don't have time in our business to be wearing out our hands doing extra clicks and having to think about it. There's only so much we can do in a day, and we need our abilities and energies for our business. Therefore, when doing inventory and item checking in E bay, it needs to be easy and quick.

  Any extra steps is more work, and it becomes a chore.

 You made feedback easier some months ago, but in the new history, it's hidden away  !

c  - The tracking is not accurate most times.  This may not be your department, but I wanted to mention it.  The postal people don't scan most packs, so the tracking is not accurate in the history page.

d - you have all that extra page space on the right and the left, so just expand the item box, and bring out the TRACKING, FEEDBACK and  RETURN  ITEM   choices like you have in the old one.  Make it easy for us, please, please.

  Also, don't put them right next to each other... separate them with space in between.

  This is where the health part comes in... I have lots of clients with back, eye and carpel tunnel problems from working

on computers.

  It's best if we have less to do... less clicking, less staring at the screen, less having to scan with the eyes, less sitting,

etc. is better on the body... it should be fast, easy, fun... and not a chore.  I'm sure you agree, and know of this.

3  -  Suggestion...   make use of colors in both back ground and fonts so we can visually find thing faster.  

  Example, any time a seller has FREE SHIPPING  it should be in green, while sellers who charge for SHIPPING, the  word and the price for shipping should be in red  ( Warning, Will Robinson... scary shipping costs ! ).

 You already have a two-tone back ground where the back of the pg. is one tone, and the items reside in bright white... the latter is harsh on the eyes. 

  We suggest to use more of the shaded tones often to partition sections and information off into boxes, like the seller name in one shaded area of a certain color, and more pertinent info like " leave feedback " in another tone.  Otherwise, it's all too busy. 

 You did do it in the old history by putting the " Estimated delivery " in a light blue shaded box...  do more like that, it works great for the eye to find things faster.

1. - Here's a major situation I've been complaining about for years... when an item has a due delivery date, you have it set up to disappear from our history list in about 3 to 7 days, which I discovered over a year ago, after we found that many mailed items never showed up, and within a week they were gone from our list, which means we have lost a ton of money because of that... and you guys never let us know about that.

  What I did in 2018... I personally watched the history items that were past the due date, and sure enough they would not sit there more than 7 days.  Trying to find the item in the history archives is a nightmare since the items have been stripped away of their menu choices. 

 That is seriously a major dis-service.  Because of my getting into the habit of using the track no. to find items, I found how many items never showed up during the entire year... well over 200  out of several thousand that we ordered.  That is many hundreds of dollars we've been losing in prior years because of items disappearing from our list.

  When an item is late, we contact the sellers to say we are willing to wait an extra week or two for it to show up, but then it is gone from our list.  It's quite annoying.  We should have the option to send it to archives when we want to.

  So, last year, we got a lot of refunds, which also resulted in being blocked by some sellers... though it's not our fault items don't show up, and we know we are being honest, but how can we prove that ?  You can't, really.  So... we took a chance on being blocked, and having it affect our reputation for something that is not our fault... but that's our discovery.. the postal system is flawed, and that lose amount does not include the items from lying sellers whose descriptions don't match the item, or the damaged items, mostly by the rough handling of the postal machines.

  We decided to not take the loss, but instead take the chance of speaking up about it and have that affect our activity.

  Just in the last month, items with due dates are disappearing the next day, consistently !  What's up with that ?

We don't even get a chance to give feedback or do anything since we don't recall exactly what the items were.  Are you guys even aware of any of this ?  I've complained about it before but I don't think your agents passed it on because now it's worse than ever.

  And of course, no one can do a return / refund unless it is past the due date, so it appears we are being targeted in not being allowed to do returns... or is it a glitch, because I just checked our 2nd buying account in Firefox  ( our first account is using Chrome ) and I see that it was the new History yesterday, but today it's back to the old History, with no choice to go to the new history, so it looks like someone is messing around with the programming.

The " Didn't Win " list lasts a month, yet,  the history list items are, as of right now, disappearing.... why is that ?

[eburtonlab]

If you liked the old Purchase history page, you might find one of these links worth bookmarking:

https://my.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MyEbayBeta&View=WonNext&Column=SaleDate&SubmitAction.ChangeFilt...

https://my.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MyEbayBeta&currentpage=MyeBayNextAllBuying#myRCP313_hm

And this feedback link might also be useful for keeping track of which items need feedback:

https://my.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MyEbay&CurrentPage=MyeBayFeedback&FClassic=true&ssPageName=STRK...

It seems that many of the changes eBay has made recently are designed to make the web site look and operate more like the mobile site with big blue buttons and popups replacing more easily searchable lists of text. Sometimes it's possible to find a link that points to an old layout, and bookmarking those links is often the best way to avoid the latest format changes and preserve the old functionality.

I hope this helps.

[greg5000]

Your post is much appreciated by those like me, who expects logical & well thought out process changes.

I'm a former Customer Quality Manager for a very large International Corporation.   I used to live near eBay Headquarters in San Jose and drove by the campus daily, as it was being newly constructed.  I also had an opportunity to meet the eBay Leadership team last year.

The two major issues that need immediate attention by Corporate Leadership are:

1. Implementing common sense and error free user functionality on the Website.
2. Customer Support improvements, including CS Reps. who actually help to resolve problems and do not violate eBay's own policies by taking improper actions.

As of this post and for the past week+, the eBay Website is not accessible for many customers.  You can see many posts and my posts here at CB Technical Issues re. this.  The poor and slow response, to address this one issue, speaks volumes as to the way eBay treats its customers. 

To those who post a work-around solution for the many, many Technical Issues, Badly Designed Web Pages, and Poorly Designed Processes, these are appreciated, but ultimately they don't address the real concerns being posted.  The work-around solutions are also often limited in resolving problems, may not work, and ultimately add more steps and time to the process.