Real Time Purchase History Too Narrow

[quebecalpha]

As a longtime (20+ years) eBay buyer and seller, I'm disappointed that the platform now gives only a 3-year limited window to purchase history.    In order to find the records of something outside of this window, you must figure out how to request your data, and then eBay creates a special report; the disclaimer that eBay provides is that could take "up to 7 days".    Must be those slow electrons in California....

This is a big step BACKWARDS in customer service.    Need to do warranty research on a prior purchase?   Tough luck --- fill out a form, wait 7 days.    Need to find a part for a purchase and track down the seller?   Get in the bit-bucket line and wait.

This brave new world of 'digital customer service transformation' isn't progress.

[shipscript]

@quebecalpha 

In the digital world, while storage is relatively cheap, there is an area of diminishing returns in maintaining available bandwidth and throughput. As an example, I have a server, costing about $4K a year, on which my tools offer free services to eBay sellers. Sometimes sellers over-use my server (since it is "free" to them) and no one can get in or complete their jobs (the tragedy of the commons). To solve that problem, I could probably upgrade to a $10K plan with a higher guaranteed throughput. But then it would be underutilized during the down times and would only serve me well during peak abuse (very poor return on investment).  Of course, the solution would be to force scheduling and charge for computer time, particularly on larger jobs, and, more specifically so, on jobs that require a fast turnaround. That example leads to this observation:

eBay is a site that is transaction-intensive for the main reason that every seller is unique, adding quite a few more parameters to data base searches, listing processes, and ordering processes, than would be the case with an online retailer.

eBay decided that maintaining high speed bandwidth and accessibility on their site meant keeping only 3 years of live data on the site and archiving the rest. They pruned several other areas, as well as their buying and selling data, to improve throughput. By providing a  7-day retrieval window, eBay can access that archived data when their servers are not as busy serving daily customers. The queue is scheduled to run whenever there is a slot.

In recent years, people have come to rely on buying space "in the cloud" to store their data and provide computational services. I'm surprised eBay doesn't charge a fee for archive retrieval, since buyers could easily store their own buying and selling data locally, rather than leaning on eBay, but many choose not to (or have moved or lost that data).  I could see eBay offering an express service for 24 hour turnaround for a fee; and perhaps they have that in mind for the future as more people come to rely on eBay's archive retrieval.

[kensgiftshop]

@quebecalpha 

If it had a manufacture warranty, the information would have been inside or printed on the package.

Unless the seller was an authorized dealer, the manufacture won't stand behind their warranties for items sold on sites like Ebay.

If it was a Chinese seller advertising a warranty, they are pretty much worthless.

[quebecalpha]

Forgive me, but it seems as if you are representing only the views of the company (eBay) -- I find this to be a very odd reply for someone who would be a valid seller.   In looking over your site, it is full of "tests".

Memory and storage are vastly cheaper than what it was.    Look at the massive amount of memory all of us carry around in our smartphones (!) compared to only a few years ago.   AND, the tiny amount of data that even thousands of transactions records consume is not much -- it is not like the site is storing video for each transaction.

Suggesting that eBay should charge for accessing my own transactional data  is the big giveaway.

This is more of the Death of Customer Service in an increasingly monopolistic world.

[quebecalpha]

I'm not sure I know anyone who saves the packaging or a piece of paper that a warranty may be printed on -- particularly for an item that was purchased longer than 3 years ago.   That's unrealistic in this age of digital everything.

This looks like the first step for eBay to set a boil-the-frog scenario to eventually charge for accessing our own data.   "Monetize everything" is the new customer service.

Agree on China and worthless warranties.