@castlemagicmemories wrote:
Ran out of edit time.
A review of the first ten pages of the Tech Issues Board shows three posts on this.
Wow. That took a LOT of time out of a busy day. Good research like this is appreciated.
That said, though, I'm going to have to side with the OP on this one, and I'll tell you why. First: full disclosure- yes, I too have adblocker. WHY I have it is a very simple question to answer. The answer is eBay.
Years ago, everytime I tried to shop here on eBay it was a frustrating experience because the sudden explosion of popups here just started browser freezing and crashing for me- and it WAS an "experience" unique to eBay.
To this day I can shop on Amazon or Etsy with the darn thing turned off, but NOT on eBay.
Another thing that bugs me is that absolutely anything I look at on eBay stalks me all over the WWW. Car forums? There it is. News articles? There it is. Yahoo home page? Check. Google? Check.
Adblocker doesn't seem to affect this because they're not popups. But why do I want a watch I looked at for my wife's birthday following me all over the Web- and following her too on her laptop?
I'm sure there's some sort of a workaround for this issue, too, but it again begs the question... why should any buyer need multiple workarounds to be able to buy on eBay?
In the research you mention, one also needs to take into consideration the fact that most people posting on the boards are like us, frequent flyers who got hooked on eBay when it was the greatest, before eBay seemed to be more interested in being eBay than in being the convoluted, counterintuitive rat maze ongoing social experiment it seems to have become.
Likely for every buyer on the boards here there may be 1000 who are not, and thus your survey is only of a very limited, controlled subset of eBay buyers. What about the occasional users or the newbies who have been shopping elsewhere without even a hint of "needing" Adblocker to go buy stuff at a marketplace?
Here's an example- my mom. My dad passed away, too young, at 78 in 2016. He did absolutely everything for my mom down to putting gas in her car.
My brother and I have slowly trained her to use the internet for banking, shopping, etc. For the first year and a half I had to buy stuff on Amazon for her. Finally I got her set up and showed her how it's done and she still just shakes her head over how easy it is and how fast stuff comes. She's tried Etsy once or twice, too.
One day she was looking for something she couldn't find. She called me over here in Oregon from Ohio for me to help her. I found it for her on eBay and suddenly there was a stony silence, followed by "I do NOT like eBay."
Winds up... you guessed it- she had wandered into eBay some time before with no adblocker. Also, she just wasn't sure how to make an account and didn't like having to sign up for PayPal. She said she kept getting prompted to sign in with Facebook which she did not like but she tried it anyways... and THEN everyplace she went the things she TRIED to see followed her for days. She said the whole thing seemed like a sleazy scam and she's got a point.
Sure, an 80 year old widow might not be the demographic eBay would prefer, but she has money- a LOT of money- in her pocket to spend and eBay basically blew her off.
How many times a day do you suppose this happens?
I think the OP has a right to be concerned. I really wish eBay would REALLY go industry standard with how the site functions- for once REAL "industry standard" and not "this is what we want you to have to go through so we'll CLAIM it's 'Industry Standard'"- and not continue to be the annoyingly quaint throwback to the 1990s technology- wise that it is. There's just no excuse for this. None.
Chaos is NOT an "industry standard".
