@dhbookds wrote:Failure to test features before going live.......resulting in glitches, while at the same time, not announcing changes which leaves everyone to wonder if something is a "change" or a "glitch", with the ensuing confusion, resentment, etc.
To sum it up..........there seems to be NO oversight or quality control on programming changes.....at least from all the mistakes made in the last 6-10 months.......and NO public relatons effort toward sellers.
Thank you; you've saved me a bunch of typing there. 
I don't get the sense that the company is disorganized so much as that it's constricted: someone higher up gets a brain fart of an idea, and rams it down the chain to be implemented as soon as possible. This despite the fact that the idea may be demonstrably impractical, poorly thought through and/or poorly implemented in code.
We've seen the impractical and poorly-thought-through happening any number of times, including this most recent fiasco, where the change (redirecting requests for closed/sold items to live items instead) didn't account for circumstances where the user needed to see that specific ended item, not a new one (e.g. comparison shopping; dispute resolution), and the page that was delivered had either an obscured link to the intended destination, or no link at all.
We've seen the poorly-implemented code on many occasions as well, such as page redesigns that ended up wasting more space than the page they replaced, or pages that required more key-clicks to complete an operation than the page they replaced. For example, the newfangled "Seller Hub" spread selling information over multiple pages that the old My eBay page was able to supply in one.
More significantly, we've seen pages and official emails with basic spelling and grammatical errors, suggesting that even the most rudimentary testing or peer review has been skipped. It appears that coding duties are being farmed out to code writers with little or no knowledge of eBay operation, and what is handed back goes into live Production use with no testing. For example, prior to rolling out the new code, did anyone notice that some redirects were giving the user a page that had no possible way of accessing the link to the ended listing that he was attempting to reach?
Finally, the lines of communication between users and anyone within eBay who is able to either explain changes, defend them or fix them are tightly controlled to the point of strangulation. For example, with this most recent change in behavior for accessing ended listings, there is no one at eBay who has stood up and said, "This is the change we made, this is the problem that we are attempting to solve, and this is why we think it's a good idea."
Instead, the front-line folks such as Trinton, Alan & company appear to have had no warning that this was coming, and yet at the same time are on such a tight leash that they can't come right out and say, "Hey, it's news to us. Let us check into this and find out what the heck is going on." Instead, they're forced to write in a gurgling sort of Marketing-speak that doesn't install any confidence that things can get resolved, or that they have the clout to advocate on behalf of eBay customers. I suspect if they were fortified with a couple of stiff Gin and Tonics (I recommend Tanqueray) and presented with a keyboard, their responses would suddenly get a lot more colorful, if not more accurate.
In conclusion, I have never encountered a company more walled-off from its customers than this one, and the resulting lack of clear, two-way communication, combined with inept design, coding and testing is what leads to this sort of a mess. Its shareholders deserve better. So do the rest of us.
