The Next Generation of eBay Still Sucks
I just spent the last hour attempting to use eBay's new Sell Your Item (SYI) process to list a nice Polycom speakerphone I've had lying around the house for a while. Now, this "new" interface isn't exactly new. They've been testing it for nearly a year, maybe more. It sucked then and it sucks now. But then, so does the current process.
The new SYI is "streamlined" and can be completed in far fewer pages than the existing process. However, that hasn't made it any easier to complete. In fact, this process took me far longer than it typically does (perhaps because I'm used to the old process, but that's a pretty lame excuse). None of the sections are very visually distinctive, so it's easy to get lost on the form and forget which section you are in. I repeatedly "forgot" to complete fields that were required because none of the fields have been labeled as such.
There are all sorts of little dynamic goodies lurking around on the page and you're never quite sure when, how or why they are going to show up. Things like bubble help, changing icons, little question marks and little [i] thingies are everywhere. My least favorite of these intrusions is the help panel. The help panel "helpfully" constrains horizontal space by inserting itself along the right hand side of the window. Help is in a separate frame, so I find myself constantly scrolling the help frame instead of the main window. It also seems to load several seconds after the main window (at which time it resizes the main window) which I found endlessly annoying.
If there's a WYSIWYG editor or spell check in there, I never found it. Same goes for spell check. I discovered the Description field didn't even accept my carriage returns only after submitting the form and viewing the preview (more on this disaster later). I had to go back a page and enter HTML by hand to get half-decent formatting. Oh, did I mention it's slow? Yes, it's very slow and without WYSIWYG editing I found myself really able to appreciate just how slow.
There's also this new preview iframe. It's supposed to let you see what your listing will look like on the page along with all sorts of other seller-specific junk. I mean... it lets you see the listing just as it would look if you had your browser sized to like 400w X 200h. You know. Just how it will look to your prospective buyer. Right. Again, the horizontal screen real estate is crowded in this scenario and the proliferation of iframes everywhere makes using the scroll wheel darn near impossible.
Okay, so this is not going well. How could it get worse? How's lost data sound? Hooray! After struggling with the listing for a good 50 minutes, my browser crashed. I've seen it crash before on rare occasion when I had written some crazy bad JavaScript. I imagine I ran into a similar problem here. But that's okay because there's auto-save, right? Right? Wait. You mean there's no auto-save? Listen, it's 2006 and there's this thing some folks call AJAX. It's really cool. It lets you do auto-save fairly easily. In fact, I'm watching it work right now as I write this blog. If my browser crashes now (which it won't) I have nothing to worry about, save the last few keystrokes.
I think I'll just list my Polycom on Amazon. They already have a description on their site and next to the $299 list price, my item is going to look like a real steal.
I just spent the last hour attempting to use eBay's new Sell Your Item (SYI) process to list a nice Polycom speakerphone I've had lying around the house for a while. Now, this "new" interface isn't exactly new. They've been testing it for nearly a year, maybe more. It sucked then and it sucks now. But then, so does the current process.
The new SYI is "streamlined" and can be completed in far fewer pages than the existing process. However, that hasn't made it any easier to complete. In fact, this process took me far longer than it typically does (perhaps because I'm used to the old process, but that's a pretty lame excuse). None of the sections are very visually distinctive, so it's easy to get lost on the form and forget which section you are in. I repeatedly "forgot" to complete fields that were required because none of the fields have been labeled as such.
There are all sorts of little dynamic goodies lurking around on the page and you're never quite sure when, how or why they are going to show up. Things like bubble help, changing icons, little question marks and little [i] thingies are everywhere. My least favorite of these intrusions is the help panel. The help panel "helpfully" constrains horizontal space by inserting itself along the right hand side of the window. Help is in a separate frame, so I find myself constantly scrolling the help frame instead of the main window. It also seems to load several seconds after the main window (at which time it resizes the main window) which I found endlessly annoying.
If there's a WYSIWYG editor or spell check in there, I never found it. Same goes for spell check. I discovered the Description field didn't even accept my carriage returns only after submitting the form and viewing the preview (more on this disaster later). I had to go back a page and enter HTML by hand to get half-decent formatting. Oh, did I mention it's slow? Yes, it's very slow and without WYSIWYG editing I found myself really able to appreciate just how slow.
There's also this new preview iframe. It's supposed to let you see what your listing will look like on the page along with all sorts of other seller-specific junk. I mean... it lets you see the listing just as it would look if you had your browser sized to like 400w X 200h. You know. Just how it will look to your prospective buyer. Right. Again, the horizontal screen real estate is crowded in this scenario and the proliferation of iframes everywhere makes using the scroll wheel darn near impossible.
Okay, so this is not going well. How could it get worse? How's lost data sound? Hooray! After struggling with the listing for a good 50 minutes, my browser crashed. I've seen it crash before on rare occasion when I had written some crazy bad JavaScript. I imagine I ran into a similar problem here. But that's okay because there's auto-save, right? Right? Wait. You mean there's no auto-save? Listen, it's 2006 and there's this thing some folks call AJAX. It's really cool. It lets you do auto-save fairly easily. In fact, I'm watching it work right now as I write this blog. If my browser crashes now (which it won't) I have nothing to worry about, save the last few keystrokes.
I think I'll just list my Polycom on Amazon. They already have a description on their site and next to the $299 list price, my item is going to look like a real steal.
posted by Craig at
8:11 PM
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