Why does eBay go out of their way to piss off their users? This is what happens when you’re huge and there are no competitors. You end up pissing off customers and not putting enough energy into trying to delight them. Why bother trying to make users happy when you don’t have to? Afterall, they’re already paying customers, and they’ve got nowhere else to go.
Reminds me of Microsoft in the 90′s. Why fix IE when there are no real alternatives? That attitude led to Firefox, which of course led to massive UI and security fixes implemented in IE7 and now IE8 in an effort to stop shedding marketshare.
Until there’s a Firefox to eBay’s IE, all we can do is rant publicly. Here’s my story to add to the cacophony of “eBay sucks” rants.
90% of the time, selling on eBay is fine. Things work as expected, and I don’t want to tear out my hair selling on the site.
The remaining 10% of the time, though, when there is a glitch, it’s incredibly frustrating. Not because of the glitch itself — stuff happens, I understand — but it’s the lack of recourse that’s incredibly frustrating.
I got one of eBay’s inexplicable error messages today, followed up by the classic “add insult to injury” way I feel like eBay likes to treat its users.
Situation:
I want to edit a listing to add shipping options. Simple. I do this everyday.
Problem #1:
When I go to submit my changes, I get this error:
Please provide the correct information in the highlighted fields.
Please enter a valid value.
But there are no highlighted fields!
Here’s the screenshot of the error message. If someone can point out which “highlighted field” has a bogus value, please tell me!
Just to make sure it wasn’t my changes that were triggering the error, I clicked to revise the item, but did not make any changes, and then hit submit. Same error with a totally unrevised listing. Um, ok. WTF?
Got the same error on both IE8 and Firefox 3.
Problem #2 (compounding the frustration):
There’s a nice little “live help” link in the upper right hand corner of the listing editing form. Great! In theory. When I click on it though, the chat box is stuck “loading”. I waited about 2 minutes, then retried. Same thing.
By this time, my blood pressure had reached a boiling point. I was going to punch my monitor if I didn’t rant somewhere, so here I am. I wanted to make a 30 second change to one listing. When that didn’t work as expected, and not being able to reach customer service to get help for my inexplicable error, I came to vent here instead.
Resolution:
Other than end the listing and create a new one? None I’m aware of.
I suppose trying again tomorrow, and hoping the glitch has been fixed, is one way to go.
Hi, I'm Greg. I'm a cofounder of Killer Aces Media. We publish community blogs like 
