What has RUINED eBay for you and how would you improve it?

[jpa61]

I believe that eBay has been RUINED by the current management/Developers, I have been on eBay for over twenty years, I used to buy every month but now the risk just seems too high.

The first thing that MUST be fixed is to respect customers choices in settings, that means a tick box that says NO to certain countries and NO MEANS NO, so when I say NO Chinese suppliers, I means none, not those that are based in China but use UK fulfilment and quotes UK city in location.  It is quite simple, if it says "registered in China since xxxx date" when you drill down on the supplier then that is the field I want used to remove suppliers from my listings.

Next, I want to be able to remove (and ban) all suppliers that use pricing that is designed to "game" the eBay search (Google has a lifetime ban if you try to game their listings so why not eBay).  What is "gaming" well search for a product, sort by price and you will see at the top a bunch of listings that say 99p to £27, when you open the listing you find that they have stuck in some useless washer or piece of fabric that costs 99p and the true price is £27 or maybe £18.  If people can't be honest then they do not deserve my business.  The issues here are it creates more clutter and wastes users time.

Next is screen design, it looks as if it has been designed for an iPad with minimal content and a requirement to press a button or perform an action to see what you need to make a decision.  This does not translate well to a laptop regardless of screen size or settings.

Part of the design issue is so much injected content within the sales page, I have had to use adblock software to block whole sections of the eBay listing page like

"similar items",

" customers also bought",

"Similar Items from eBay shops",

"you may also like",

"consider these items",

"Frequently bought together",

"explore related sponsored items",

"consider these items AGAIN",

"Find more Sponsored items"

"Sponsored Items from Popular Sellers"

"Similar customers also bought"

"Find more sponsored items AGAIN"

In fact this goes on and on and on, but I only scrolled so much because I could not find the delivery box that we used to have, it had a tab and said counties they shipped too and additional terms (no term can override the CSR see below).

Next is eBay hiding negative feedback, it includes only positive feedback rather than the latest good, the latest neutral and the latest negative feedback, worse still you really have to work through about 5 hurdles to see negative feedback.  1. Click on percentage in listing, 2. scroll 3. Click See all Feedback 4. Switch back to classic view 5. Scroll 6. click on the number of negative feedback for 12 months. 7 Scroll .  SEVEN steps to get what you should get when you click on 1, actually to be fair when you click on the percentage in 1 you should go straight to 6 but it should scroll down for you to the where the feedback is displayed.

While on Design on mobile the app is unusable, you can't even see the description without pressing a button to see what they call full description and now we have descriptions being written by AI so we can't even make a decision based on who we are dealing with and what they promise. 

I will NEVER make an eBay offer again because you make me PAY before, this has RUINED the whole experience of making an offer,  in no other business do you pay upfront to make an offer and it is a huge waste of my time.

Finally, there seems to be a disconnect between eBay understanding that they are subject to UK law, be this the Consumer RIghts Act 2015 (CSR) for consumers or the Sale of Goods Act 1979 which still applies to businesses.

The CSR says that a product or service must be

Be fit for purpose

Last for a reasonable period of Time

Be of reasonable Quality

Be as Described

It also says that Risk lies with the Supplier until there is proof of delivery to the buyers hands, so for a courier that means a door open and as consumer lawyer Dean Dunham said on Sunday 8th September, if a different item is in the box then it is up to the Supplier to PROVE the item paid for was in the box.  (we have recently seen 3 cases where Amazon has packed other items from Washing powder to babies bottles in place of computer parts, in these cases there was no  sign of tamper which suggests the issue is at the Amazon warehouse.  I have never seen this issue with eBay (yet) but I have had products never arrive or product quality truly awful and description not only failing the "as described" aspect but it being impossible description.

eBay relies on community policing which is fine except that it does more and more to make it impossible to police suppliers.  I should be able to have a tick box in the listings to "remove and police" later, then when I press "apply" button these should disappear from my results and go to a screen where I report them later.  I am talking about

Mass Duplicate listings, identical listings from shops owned by same company but named differently, FAKE products - I means a battery cell with fake specs that are actually impossible or a USB Storage device with FAKE storage capacity in the form factor described or that used compression and overwrite your data. 

Listing a FAKE product should result in an instant lifetime ban, not just for the company, but for the individual directors and the payment methods they use (bank account, credit card or debit card).

If eBay mirrors the Consumer Rights Act 2015 in its rules to the sellers, then it shows a commitment to be a safe place to buy.  Also note that the CSR says that Consumers should not be inconvenienced.

Currently if I want to buy a second hand product I can't efficiently see and review the offerings because of all the scammers.  Maybe we need a further tick box in our settings to remove all business suppliers.  That would go some way to making eBay safer.

Also, I would like ALL boxes with character limits to have such limits removed and all boxes that only offer fixed choices (like reporting a seller) to have an "Other" option that produces a box with unlimited text.  All reports to eBay should kick off an email to confirm what has been reported including any text typed and emails showing the stages of that procedure as they are reached along with the determination.

Please reply with your own issues and improvement suggestions.

[department28]

A very good post. You only have to look at the threads on this forum to see how many issues people are having with eBay. I think many of us feel it has been going downhill for some time. 

For me, it is the constant tinkering around with the layout. It seems every other day, something has been changed, and not for the better. Everything requires so much more scrolling & clicking & fiddling around. Useful features have been removed, and unnecessary features added, like the defaulting to 'relevant' instead of 'most recent' feedback. It is taking longer & longer to find the information you used to be able to see at a glance, or with just a couple of clicks.

They have now replaced pretty much all the nice Classic View pages, and in my opinion, this has completely spoiled both the look & functionality of the site. The new Feedback Profile page is just awful. 

I also dislike seeing the site completely cluttered with sponsored items - they are squashed in everywhere now. I find all the 'picks for you' stuff really irritating, especially when they include my first name - we should be able to opt out of this sort of unasked for 'personalization'.

I wish eBay would look at the points you have raised, listen to its users, and actually do something to improve the mess they have made of everything.

[m25jet]

All very good points put forward so far, but I can think of some more ways in which eBay could make some significant improvements, rather than endlessly screwing around with the site and making unnecessary changes which only serve to exacerbate existing problems or create new ones that didn't exist previously.

In my opinion I think it would be good if eBay introduced a feature for buyers entitled Blacklisted Sellers List, set up in a similar way to a seller's Blocked Bidders List, that a buyer could use to stop the search results from showing items from buyers that he/she had added to the Blacklisted Sellers List and had no wish to see in the search results.  This would then help to prevent unwanted results from sellers with whom that buyer had had a bad buying experience from showing up in the search results, ensuring that only listings from sellers who weren't blacklisted showed up when the buyer ran a search for a particular item.

Another thing I think would be a vast improvement on the site's current state would be for eBay to give buyers the option to block advertisements from overseas sellers pretending that the item is located in the UK when in fact it is actually located in some far-flung corner of the globe and is going to take an age to turn up if purchased.  Ideally eBay should be weeding out these kind of listings which only serve to clutter up the site and make it more user unfriendly, but if they refuse to do so then they should at least have the decency to provide buyers with the tools to set up their own blocks to filter out these kind of listings!

There is something that eBay used to do which was actually very good, but they've since spoiled the site by getting rid of it, and I feel that eBay ought to give serious consideration to reinstating it.  What I'm referring to here is the icons we used to have, such as the £ sign for Paid, which would be greyed out until the item was paid for, and also the Item Despatched, Feedback Left and Feedback Received icons.  These were extremely useful and allowed the user to tell at a glance whether or not each of these had been actioned, but unfortunately eBay felt fit to scrap them, which seems to be par for the course with eBay - ie:  if something is useful and popular they get rid of it, but if it's ineffective and despised by thousands of users then they allow it to stay!  What kind of idiots do they employ at eBay who think that it is better to make things more complicated to use as opposed to making the site as straightforward as possible to use?

This brings me on to my next point.  Clearly eBay do not have a team of competent IT Engineers working for them capable of bringing about significant improvements to the site, so if I had my way I would recruit IT Engineers who were extremely skilled at their trade and who were able to bring about the necessary improvements to the site to stop the rot and start repairing the damage that has been done to the site year after year after year.  I would then get shot of every single one of the incompetent IT Engineers who have wreaked so much havoc on this site and clearly don't deserve the jobs that they're currently employed in.

[*guinevere*]

@m25jet  Great post very well put.

Rspecially your point about the feedback left / £ sign greyed out until paid etc. That made me quite nostalgic because they were so easy to understand. 

My pet hate is, as I don't sell very often I can never remember how to find the "Sell an item" page. You would think it would be prominently displayed  in huge letters in the seller hub, but I always seem to spend about 5 minutes or so finding it and when I do it' always tucked away in a corner in small font. Duh!

[magpiecorner1]

It takes more than twice the time to list than it used to.

Having been in sales since I was a child - and we didn't even have colour telly when I was a child -I've always worked to monthly targets.  I've years and years of ebay targets, listings per day, sales per day, listings per month, sales per month - average sales, profit margins, etc etc etc.

So I know for certain it takes more than twice as long to list.  Take more than seven times as long to sell, because auctions are all but broken, but that's another story.......

I blame item specifics - now if eBay can show me an advantage to item specifics I'd think better of them, but it would be a very simple computer tweak to make the item specifics user friendly.

For instance, in my category, the second specific is MAIN STONE.  Fair does, if there is a stone there are now 15 further sections - four of which refer specifically to diamonds.  If there is NO STONE, there are STILL 15 further sections.

Surely it would be simple to lose the 4 refering to diamonds if you don't have diamonds.

Surely it would be even more simple to lose all 15 further sections - which take up a huge amount of space on a listing - in the is NO STONE.

'Hammer to Crack a Nut' seems to be eBay's way.  That no one has changed this in all the time we have had Item Specifics shows that no one who works for eBay is either a seller or buyer for eBay.

Of course eBay isn't interested in their sellers, especially sellers of unique items (by unique I mean one off listings). 

[*guinevere*]

I sometimes look back nostagically of when I had about 30 items of sheet music to list. 

It took me less than 5 minutes to do each one, and by the time I'd finished I would have bids on a couple or so.

Nowadays it would take me a full weekend to do the same thing!

[department28]

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@*guinevere* wrote:

@m25jet  Great post very well put.

Especially your point about the feedback left / £ sign greyed out until paid etc. That made me quite nostalgic because they were so easy to understand. 

Yes, I used to love the icons, especially the little parcel that would appear with the reminder, 'I need to post 2 items' etc. Happy days, before Seller Hub & all the 'new look' pages were introduced! 

The colour scheme used to be nicer, too, and much easier on the eye.  eBay just keeps on taking away all the things that we like, and are familiar with. I suppose the yellow DSR stars on the Classic Feedback page will disappear when the new page takes over.  The DSR which appear on the badly designed Seller Shop page, are just black lines. How is that an improvement?!

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[pleasurebee]

1.Private sellers not paying fees so buinesses have to pay high fees as well as pay for the shop

2.i have only 2 bad reviews and that's because of the courier and gave a full refund and they got the item for free but now ebay dropped my seller rating to below standard and now can't promote.

3.fees too high,if I sell some ingredients for £110.00 and me £85.00 then make no profit and ebay calculator  states i  would get -36p 

4.ebay needs to be on the side of businesses  not just private sellers and now the new EU rules etc.I cannot see ebay lasting much longer with Amazon,vinted,etay 

[zoomingmouse]

For me, the love affair started to falter with the removal of the Paypal balance.
This, & the introduction of Managed Payments scared off many private sellers creating a reduction of interesting & varied items.

The large increases in fees for business sellers has made the site more expensive, as has the constant hike in postage costs.

Removal of the option to pay cash for collection items, which was just easy, mostly.

Constant glitches.

Hiding items.

Non removal of the serial frausters, non-payers, neg leavers <why would they continue to buy>.

Then add all of the excellent points raised in the above posts, of which I totally agree with, it feels like there's not too much left to sing about, except for, once n a while something amazing pops up & suddenly, all is forgiven.... for a moment.

[1956glyn]

Towards the top of my list of annoyances is.......all the silly Ai waffle.

[zoomingmouse]

Yes, mostly a total barrier to buying 🙄

[cahic6632]

I closed down my selling account when MP came in.  Hardly use the site now apart from trusted outlets.  What ruins it for me is that I can't find anything.  Irrelevant sponsored items and pages clogged up with the same photos over and over from some SE Asian outfit.  Impossible to browse.  If you buy, delivery can take 10 days.  You get something you haven't ordered but your honest review in accord with the guidelines gets removed.  Ebay was a big part of my life for many years, but no longer.  I guess I'm still here because I miss you all! 

[themidnightcaller]

Too many business sellers..

I preferred it when it was just people selling their unwanted stuff and

you could stack a basket with multiple items at once using you're Paypal

balance to pay..

The dial up from back then i don't miss however..

[moldosgifts]

Get rid of promoted listings and sort out the item specifics

I have never in my life seen a plastic ring that contains a diamond

Base it in the description then specifics will relate to the item DRESS and COSTIME jewellery will contain diamante or semi precious (stones) not diamond if the have a stone at all!

Strip the whole site back 20 years it worked without all the tinkering. 

[willa-7419]

Ridicule the seller....Ask them if they would like some maple syrup to go with it !

[maryfaerielady]

It's that, from February, buyers buying from private sellers will have to pay an additional 75p plus 4% on top of final sale price!

I spend a lot of time and effort and rely on getting low priced, second hand items. This is going to significantly raise prices on these sales. Eg a pair of second hand school shoes for £4.99 will now cost £5.95 - a rise of over 19%! And if you lucked out on a 99p 'bargain' the cost will now be 80.8% higher at £1.79!

Yes you heard it right! 80% higher on 99p!

You can work out the rise on a 1p win...

Likely ebay want customers to use Amazon and Facebook for little things. Likely the small stuff isn't worth their time any more.

I've been a buyer and sold infrequently for 21 years. This is the first time I've felt so kicked in the teeth as to seriously start shopping elsewhere - maybe with Vinted, ebid or Shpock.

Very sad.

[eternalgazeratstars]

EVERYTHING you said. And, removal of search field bar in Purchase History - I don't care to trawl through an entire year of purchases, to find "leggings" I bought two, or maybe three, years ago. No images in Recently Viewed, just greyed-out envelopes. Complete re-jig, of both appearance & functionality of Messages - generally confusing; higgledy-piggledy ordering of messages; you also can't flag any of them now & attempts to organise them resulted in failure & me hitting the Desperados! I can't be bothered with eBay anymore, especially since getting fingers burned five-too-many times by greedy unscrupulous sellers, with them agreeing to combine postage on multiple purchases, then my being hit with 12.00 GBP for postage of items that only cost them 4.00 GBP to send. I have kept complaining, to no avail. Having to input card details for making offers, when it will verify neither of the cards I used on here ALL the time: IJCBAA. 

I have, without compunction, switched allegiances; I now every day use & love the South American Jungle site - they don't constantly tinker with the interface, removing functionality; they store 600 items in Save for Later AND 600 in Recently Viewed; the buyer guarantee is just that, a guarantee; super-easy to find items & sellers included in current offers & promos; super-easy to find in a flash, something I bought ten years ago, using THE SEARCH BAR IN PURCHASE HISTORY; AND NEXT-DAY DELIVERY by them, not shysters like Royal Mail - it's a no-brainer.

Going elsewhere to avoid hassle & stress, is something we've been doing since we evolved from single-cell organisms & crawled out of the primordial soup. Soz, eBay, but, you suck. You're FIRED.

[eternalgazeratstars]

75p + 4%???????????? BYE, EBAY!

[roger_roger_over_and_nowt]

I would like to see a "system restore" button on the home page with the option to choose a year.

2004 springs to mind ...🙂

[insidethe93]

eBay doesn't care that I can't get most of the low-priced things elsewhere, certainly not at Amazon or Facebook, e.g. customised artwork, decluttered small craft items.