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.
