Nothing is more embarrassing than a company the size of eBay not practicing basic Change Control

[blingfling123]

Seriously eBay.  Change Control is the most BASIC part of the development process. 

Every couple of months someone makes a change to a report or a download.  No one bothers to tell the Users of the actual report. This is not a glitch, it is not something that was changed on the fly. Someone approved this change and then someone else changed the actual code. No one bothered to tell the end User.

This month you changed the Sales Record Number on the Orders Paid and Shipped Download report from a sequential numeric to the the actual Order Number that is 14 characters and contains special characters, and did not bother to tell anyone. 

I have no issues with report changes, I am happy to adjust to them. 

I have issues where you fundamentally change or add a field to a report or a download with no notice or not even bothering to share what changed. 

Every time this happens, anyone that has an automated process, or uses these reports has to first try to figure out what changed, and then make adjustments to the various programs that use the reports. I hate to think about how this affects people that use the big accounting programs.

This is not a minor thing. Someone went in an made a change to a financial report. That someone should be following up with someone else so that notice is given to, you know the people that actually USE the reports.   

You have all of these places from the Announcements section in the Seller hub to this very forum to notify users. Why are they not being utilized to notify the Users of changes like this? 

I would be mortified if I were a company the size of eBay making changes to financial reports without bothering to tell anyone. 

[slippinjimmy]

Lots of sellers here never even read the Seller Updates so getting they top read a change log just isn't going to happen.

I'm not saying that it would not be a nice thing to have, I'm the type that does actually read release notes when a program updates but it's a rare thing.

eBay makes so many minor changes that any log would be  bursting with update notes so many of them nobody would actually read them.

So while I agree with you in principal I can see why it doesn't happen.

FYI - The bigger and more complex the company the more likely this situation occurs.

[blingfling123]

Sorry, do not agree with this.

They provide a notice for seller updates. They rarely do for reports, unless they are removing them and then they provide heaps of notice.

It is one thing to provide something and people not read it. It is another to not provide anything at all. 

They are not making multiple changes every month. It happens occasionally. 

There is no reason for them not to provide the information. Changing a financial report is NOT a little thing. 

I also do not agree with the bigger or more complex the company thing. The bigger the company, the tighter the dev process, they have to or they fail. Change Control is practiced down to dotting the i's and crossing the t's.  While there may be an error now and then in a release notes, they provide release notes when anything changes, especially something as important as a financial report.

[chapeau-noir]

eBay badly struggles in the communications end - it's not just providing a change log, it's pretty much everything.  Unfortunately, they're not the only one - Etsy is about as bad.  Having been in tech writing and editing much of my career, I suspect why - communications (as opposed to marcom) is perceived as revenue-negative overhead and no one wants to pay for it, yet there is almost zero understanding of why it's essential (and actually NOT overhead).

[kensgiftshop]

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@blingfling123 wrote:

I would be mortified if I were a company the size of eBay making changes to financial reports without bothering to tell anyone. 

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It wouldn't matter if Ebay said anything or not, some sellers don't keep up to date on anything.

Look at Managed Payments, we were told almost 5 years ago about switching over.

You get some sellers that have been switched over and they say they didn't know anything about it.

If these sellers don't care enough to keep up on how they are going to get paid, do you think they are going care about changes made to some reports?

[blingfling123]

Again, it does not matter if some sellers ignore notices or not. There are plenty that DO pay attention and making changes like this affects their operations and costs time and money.

Ignorance by some is not an excuse to not provide basic user communication of a change to a financial report. 

[johnrj1226]

"If wishes were horses beggars would ride."

"there Is no such thing as a Utopia."  Until  this  happens - keep reading eBay's Announcements. 

" You can please every body"  In your very best efforts you will only  please 80% of the  whole population/r membership/community, etc.  "cause

Based on your feedback profile - you seem to be only an eBay Buyer w/ 9 FB as a buyer & 0 as a seller - maybe you have a separate account as a seller?

Similar to  chapeau-noir my first  job out  of college was that  of  a Senior Technical Writer.  We produced the parts, service and operator manuals for fork lilt trucks - almost every day we would receive engineer change notifications.  We only  published notifications to our dealer organization that significantly affected serviceability or operating functions  of the equipment.  If the change was a change that was directly inter changeable   with the  a new  part # due to vendor  or material  composition changes - we sent no notifications - unless it was a safety concern.

[inhawaii]

"Change control"?

I've honestly never heard that phrase before.

Must have been invented by someone who REALLY hates change.

[slippinjimmy]

Although eBay doesn't have a dedicated public page that lists every site change big or small they do give users a heads up on some of the major upcoming changes and providing sticky notes when features are moved from one tab to another.

In the Help pages and in the Seller Hub pages of the Seller Center the pages are being updated as new features are rolled out. Can't say how quick they are updated but I skim then every few months and often find some nugget of info I was not aware of.

https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/selling-tools/seller-hub?id=4095

https://pages.ebay.com/seller-center/listing-and-marketing/seller-hub.html

[bbravo65]

...personally I don't like constantly changes...

...even from times to times, I got eBay's messages there are some changes...guess what, I ignored...sorry, I'm bad...

...to old to chase around for something, to me, unnecessary...I prefer K.I.S.S., Keep It Simple Stupid...

[blingfling123]

@johnrj1226 

Yes this is my buying account.  

I have 30 years in dev. This is not my first rodeo. 

"Until  this happens - keep reading eBay's Announcements. "  There are NO announcements, THAT is the issue. Changes are being made to financial reports now and then with NO notice or information provided anywhere. The user has to figure out that it happened and then what happened and then make adjustments accordingly. 

This is not a "we changed the way a screen works" or a "we just released this handy new seller hub (although they announced that one). These are changes to important reports that are used by thousands of users on a day to day basis. 

You also made my point.  You push notices on things that directly affect users in an important way. While changing a financial report layout or field does not cause a safety issue like an engineering change, if it fundamentally affects users in a big way for day to day, you tell the Users about it.  Changing a field from one data point to another, adding a field, removing a field or changing the layout is not just "changing a part number" it completely changes a report.  

[blingfling123]

@slippinjimmy 

I am aware of those pages. Let me share how out of date they are. 

Since the page with the report layout was posted with the new Orders Report

1 Field has had the data value changed where they changed what value is populated in the field.  (This being the one that prompted this rant. It went from a sequential system generated numeric field to an alpha field. The field had to be adjusted in both format and size to accept the new data and everything that used that sequential numeric field had to be changed for the same. Not to mention it cannot be sorted now etc.)

5 fields have been moved around in the report. They were in one location and now in another.  Why? I have no idea but it was a pain in the rear to figure out and then adjust everything.

5 new fields have been added to the report that were added prior to July 2021 (I am not dropping my report archive to find the exact date). Easy enough to add to the end but still required having to figure out that they were added and then adjust accordingly. 

The above does not include any heading name changes or any formatting changes like dates etc. 

I am firmly convinced that page has not been updated since they created the new report so yeah, that page is useless. 

And this is just ONE report. There are others with similar issues.

[blingfling123]

And the real kicker.  

While the Paid and Shipped Orders report has had the Sales Record Number changed to the Order ID, the Current Not shipped Orders report has not, it is still using the sequential system generated numeric.

So now you have two reports that are supposed to be identical that are using two different data values in one field so they do not match. 

I am also convinced that many of the people responding on this post do not use these download reports other than to download and open them, or do not use them at all. 

If you are not familiar with import functions and systems that take data from one location and then use them within a system or an application with other data, then you do not understand the issue.

And for those that keep stating that sellers do not pay attention, the sellers that are using the reports ARE paying attention.

I am one of many sellers (and applications) that import reports and use the data within, that has to rebuild the process every time something changes.

Again, no issues with doing it, the issue is not knowing that something changed, not knowing what changed and having to sometimes spend an inordinate amount of time figuring it out because eBay could not take 5 minutes to announce what was changed. And this is repeated with every seller that uses these reports beyond a "oh look a report, that's cool"

[blingfling123]

jasmen@ebay   You are the only one it would let me tag. Can you please pass this up the chain to the appropriate parties involved.  Report values and layouts are being changed with no notice to the Users and this causes huge issues for anyone or any application that uses these reports.  

[simply-the-best-for-you]

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@inhawaii wrote:

"Change control"?

I've honestly never heard that phrase before.

Must have been invented by someone who REALLY hates change.

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@inhawaii 

OP didn't make it up.   It's a common phrase & construct in IT Development & especially, in Maintenance.   They are correct that it's one of the first things implemented, as well.   You can't just be applying changes willy-nilly & to live systems.  

The disconnect is that in most organizations, the changes are REQUESTED by the end users, so they know what projects are being worked on & why.  That doesn't apply here.   So while I completely agree with the OP, I don't see it happening.   

Hell, I worked at a huge (multi billion $$$) software company & we, the people who sold & supported the products, would sometimes not find out about changes until we were in front of a potential customer.   Ebay is not the only one with the problem.