ShipScript has been an eBay Community volunteer since 2003, specializing in HTML, CSS, Scripts, Photos, Active Content, Technical Solutions, and online Seller Tools.
From the choices below, which screen are you seeing now and which screen are you trying to get back to?
I don't much care for #4 and #5 either.
From screen #4, you should see the option at the top right to switch back to either Classic view #1 or Seller Hub #3. Or go directly using this link:
https://my.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MyEbayBeta&CurrentPage=MyeBayNextAllSelling
I use Seller Hub #2, which is the bulk lister and it is nearly identical to Seller Hub#3 (I haven't quite figured out why I can return to #3 from #4, but then ultimately land in #2). I always click the "Sell" link in eBay's header to get to #2, which is my active selling grid in the Hub.
Seller Hub views #2 and #3 offer the same level of detail available in #1. eBay is moving Business-registered sellers to Seller Hub.
If you can't get back to the Classic All Selling view #1, you may want to switch to the Seller Hub to return to a grid format that is more comfortable to you.
Seller Hub Help Pages:
https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/selling-tools/seller-hub?id=4095
https://pages.ebay.com/seller-center/listing-and-marketing/seller-hub.html
Clicking this next link will take you into Seller Hub, so don't click it if you don't want to go there:
I use #1 under one account and #2 under the other account and hardly notice the difference.
My suspicion is that eBay has two tasks in mind.
1) There are too many flavors of branding on the site and they want all pages to have the same look and feel.
2) They seem to be designing for mobile first, with desktop as a poor second cousin.
Design flavors: I agree that there are too many design differences, and those should be standardized so that the same functions always appear in the same place on all pages and so that the buttons carry the same labels (as opposed to "change" vs "edit" vs pencil icon). The original eBay tools were designed by different teams, and were sometimes third party tools that were integrated into the site. Some were beta tests of new features that go rolled out and that deviated from the old look. Getting tools to look more alike will mean that more standardized resources can be used over again on each page, instead of creating a new widget each time a new feature is added. This improves developer efficiency.
Mobile first: eBay is moving in the direction of a single design to support, which will work across all platforms. This will make updates much simpler because only one program module will need to be updated instead of supporting all the different variants and rolling out a plethora of changes for each, some of which might break something in one module while fixing something in another.
The preference for Mobile is why everything is so many pages deep. By loading only the relevant data that fits on one small screen, the load on mobile users is reduced.
But, as to the mobile interface, I am in the camp that wants everything on one page at a glance so that I can see where I am going and from whence I've come. I don't like traipsing down blind alleys and then backing out again. That makes me a desktop user who wants to fully utilize my desktop real estate. And mobile does NOT function the way I want it to on desktop, with its giant text and hidden sections and so much white space that I can't see any of the forest for the big trees in my face and waste a lot of time moving around to get where I'm going. I suspect eBay's research has shown that most users are on a mobile device of some sort, while my suspicion is that most sellers are on desktop.
Google has shown me that 92% of my online tool users (eBay sellers) are on desktop, so I try to provide the big picture in one screen. The only time it is necessary to go to another screen is when that next screen can't be shown initially because it has some dependency on specific user-entered data or processing results.
You are asking great questions that show some thought about the process.
There is no reason to keep buyer and seller layouts identical, since seller tools are not seen by the buyer, and while a lot of the screen layout functions can be shared, they certainly don't have to be laid out the same way. However, it gets more complicated.
There is growing acceptance of the mobile app among casual sellers, particularly now that the app includes a few snazzy tools that are not available to the desktop sellers. But the app is an entity unto itself — a different programming language for the app user interface than the web browser interface that desktops use; so eBay can only try to keep appearances the same because they will still have to write separate programs for the browser and for the app.
Additionally, there are tablets and small devices that can open a web browser to access eBay, rather than using a mobile app. That situation is where code standardization makes sense, and that is where it is possible to shuffle components on the page (and eliminate wasted white space).
The dilemma is the pointing device. Most tablet devices use touch screens; and thus the need for a lot of white space around the fat-finger buttons. While the new CSS stylesheets make it much easier to reflow pages to fit the screen, taking away white space would be a function of determining what type of pointing device is being used. I think, right now, instead of trying to determine that, eBay is just treating every screen as a touch screen, and we mouse users are stuck with a horrendous user interface.
One forum member made the rational suggestion that eBay let the user decide. Click a button to use touch layout and another to use mouse layout (perhaps in site preferences). That makes great sense to me because many of the screens can be reformatted in CSS stylesheets to remove the extra white space so that more can be seen at once, and the choice would simply load a different stylesheet.
This would not solve the problem of all the extra subscreens. It would seem possible that an "expand all" could work on many of ebay's layouts, but this would not work to bring together data that eBay has moved to entirely separate tabs. And I think that is where some of the pushback and complaints have come from sellers. Even if we can get a mouse stylesheet option in place of a touchscreen stylesheet, it still has to use the same underlying structure for both the mouse people and the finger people, which means all the tabs will still be there. The most the stylesheet can change is the white space, size and position of elements, and opening hidden sections (but even that much would make me happier with both the buying and selling pages).
We also need to loop back to programmer's time and effort. If all the layouts are the same (all touchscreen), the programmers don't need to worry about how that new mandatory field they've added to the touchscreen layout will fit into a mouse-pointer layout. On the other hand, if they choose to support two layouts, then instead of supporting two different programs, they would still have to support two different stylesheets; and a stylesheet loaded into one browser may not be intrepreted the same way as a stylesheet loaded into a different browser, so changes would still be buggy. So bottom line is probably to get everything working in the touchscreen (mobile) layout and take it from there later.
Oh, but wait. What about extensibility into the future? Are we ready for voice input? No? Then we know there is no end in sight to the changes eBay will be making.
