Hello,
I am a relatively new user. I wanted to provide feeback on the eBay interfact to the "technical issues" community.
1. Ebay UI is slow. Pages load significantly slower than Amazon or just about any other website. I suspect that this is from over use of javascript, etc, in the page. To buy and sell items I need to be able to see pictures, read text, and enter some simple form inputs. This should not necessitate megabytes of Javascript and ballooning webbrowser ram useage. As a user I would appreciate it if ebay technical managment evaluated javascript, etc, innonvations in terms of cost-benefit and value added. In my opinion anything that makes a webpage load slower without improving functional user experience is a waster of money. I don't care if the buttons in the page have composited shadows or whatever. I just want to be able to find what I want to buy and for my purchasers to be able to find what I am selling. This leads into the next point.
2. Ebay search is grossly non-deterministic. It seems that some results are hidden according to the user / lister in strange algorithmic ways. If I list X item I want users who search for X item anywhere in the world to have my listing and all other listings of X to show up in their results when they input "X" into the search field. If the user choses to sort items by price or ending soonest, etc, the UI should obey the users's wishes. Instead search hides *supresses) some listings based on shadowy parameters and relevant but not exact matches are often completely irrelevant. If I search for X I want to see all results for X not results for X and Y. I would expect to see "X 2.0" or "X module" or "X part" as relevant results not X and the twenty listings of A for A has nothing to do with X.
3. Ebay market is inefficient and not tightly coupled with the outside of Ebay market. It is like a different planet. Market price discovery and list prices are seemingly uncoupled. It is not uncommon to see listings for X as follows "Brand new X $150" "Brand new X $500" printed in the search results right adjacent to each other. In an efficient market this would not happed. Now these are list prices not final sale prices. But when list prices vary so widely final sale prices would underreasonable expectations also vary significantly from each other. It is difficult for buyers or sellers to determine the true market price of an item. Whether this is good or bad depend on the price you ask and the price you get as buyer or seller but over all it is strange and unecessary and makes it more difficult for buyer's to "shop" on Ebay.
3b. List prices are completly irrational for obselete technology. It is not uncommon to see used decade or older computers, for example to list with the original product descriptions. Yes, 10 years ago 64 MB may have been a respectable amount of video ram for a laptop. It is not now. So to list a laptop with words that seem like they have been pulled directly from the OEM marketing archives, for example "Cutting edge ATI X1400 64 MB Graphics" is ridiculous. However this is ubiquitous. Do people buy these item at or near list prices? If so why? If not why are list prices so uncoupled from reality? Why is the ebay market so economically inefficient? It is unclear if sellers don't know how to price their items or are banking on stupid buyers. But cutting and pasting your laptop ad from the CNET product review page written in 2005 is just silly.
4. Ebay fees for sellers are unreasonably high in many cases for the services they offer. Fees are uncoupled from the marginal cost to eBay of listing an item. For example it costs ebay (in terms of server space, fractional overhead, etc) roughly the same amount to sell a $5000 item as a five dollar item. However, the seller of the five dollar item is charged $0.50 is fees (if fixed price listing) vs $500 for the higher value item. It would seem that in order to generate more overall fee revenue eBay would want to move up market and charge low item value sellers proportionally more and high item value sellers proportionally less rather than everyone a flat 10% rate. From the much greater fee savings it is possible that a high item value seller can justify moving off eBay more readily than I low item value seller. In other words high item value sellers generate more revenue per item sold for ebay but need ebay as a venue less than low item value sellers who generate less marginal revenue. For long term sucess ebay should reward its greatest revenue generators proportionally more than its least. However it looks like as a publically traded company, the strategy is to squeez as much out of the market place quarter to quarter without regard for long term consequences. If margins are better of eBay than on it is easier for high value low volume item sellers to move off than low value low volume item sellers. Ultimately they will. In the meantime if the company keeps squeezing the goose the eggs will keep popping out. Eventually they'll squeez so hard the shells break inside the goose.
