eBay is Obsolete.
Monday, September 15th, 2008 The minmum length of time for an eBay sale or auction is three days.
So if at Friday noon I decide I can’t make it to the football game on Saturday at 1:00pm I put the tickets up for sale on eBay. No one wants the tickets so at 9:00am Monday morning the auction is still active for an event that ocurred two days ago. Lazy sloppy IT? Cheapskate management?
I am constantly annoyed that eBay refuses to provide more than a 60 day transaction history. It would be trivial for a comopany of the size of eBay to provide at least a previous tax year accounting of transactions.
And why not an individualized black list for spamming sellers and bad sellers? As a buyer I have to manually cull out sellers I don’t want to see. Very low tech.
I shopped for a processor on eBay recently. I could select AMD,Intel, or other. There was no way to select for speed, socket type, condition, FSB speed, retail or OEM, cooling type….A sophomore computer science class at a public university could design a better interface for selling and buying CPUs.
eBay’s idea of innovation is a slow, clumsly, javascript facelift that, fortunately eBayers can opt out of for now and a discount deal which give large volume sellers a discount.
Moving menu items that users have been accustomed to for 10 years is proven loser (e.g. Microsoft Vista.)
The eBay market is ready for the taking. eBay management may be aware of this and is looking to maximize short term profit.