First impressions of the new My eBay beta

10/08/2008 at 21:36

The new My eBay beta is now available for users to check out and is looking great. The clunky headers from the old eBay are gone and have been replaced with a newly-,designed tabbed page complete with drop downs to access the key sections.

However when it comes to using it, it’s not nearly as feature rich as the old My eBay. While the aesthetics have obviously been given a high priority, it doesn’t appear that enough thought has been given to how people use the site.

My eBay beta positive changes

The entire My eBay look and feel has been updated; the graphic designers really have done a good job in making the page easy on the eye with newly designed icons and section headers.

The introduction of lists is a great new tool. You can create lists for gift ideas, products you want to research, a wish list of items to buy, in fact a list for pretty much anything. The only drawback is that you can only add items to a list if they already appear in My eBay. Do I really want to add things I’ve already added to my watch list or already bought? Apart from that the only items I can add are those I’m actually selling – not a great source of gift ideas, but I’d hope it’ll be expanded to enable items to be added from elsewhere on the site in the future.

Shortcuts replace the links section of My eBay, but they’ve been expanded so that you can now add your own links to this section. Do you want instant access to your blocked bidder list? How about a link to the PowerSeller board? You can even add links to sites off eBay: maybe a link to your online banking would be useful?

The ability to customise My eBay to display the information that’s important to you has always been great and the new My eBay allows you to do this. The new My eBay takes customisation even further to the extent of allowing changes the colours of the page headers.

Sidebar adverts have been removed from My eBay: no longer are they slowing down the page load and hopefully it’s not a temporary move. Adverts in My eBay have largely been irrelevant to users and leave parts of the page unusable until they have loaded.

My eBay beta neutral changes

The summary page is simply a summary of summaries. It adds nothing and doesn’t give enough information on anything to be useful. This is a page that might as well not exist bar the fact that it displays buying and selling totals and they’re no longer available anywhere else. The only thing it might do is scare buyers into curtailing their spending as it highlights how much they’ve already spent.

In lists of items the focus has been shifted to the item title with the User ID and item number displayed in a relatively small font. If a buyer contacts you regarding a purchase they’re likely to give you their User ID and the item number – this is going to make it visually harder to locate transactions in the future. You’ll need to have already customised the page to add in the item number and buyer ID, or you’ll have no way of distinguishing between identical sales.

If buyers don’t customise the display to show their sellers ID alongside their purchase, they’ll simply be shown the item title and purchase date. I don’t know why eBay haven’t added the seller ID with a clickable link as standard, which might encourage buyers to revisit sellers they’ve purchased from.

One of the most useful sections of My eBay has always been selling and sold totals. Selling totals gave an overview of likely income over the next week and sold totals was an instant check on whether business over the last month was up or down.


In the new My eBay selling totals have been hidden away on the summary page. This is critical information for sellers and really needs to be displayed on the selling and sold pages.
 
A useful feature of the old eBay was to display up to 200 items per page: the My eBay beta limits this to 100 per page. This isn’t critical, but it would be good to keep the option of 200. A slight glitch is that in items sold SIF items are showing the ended date as the date the SIF will renew, not the date the buyer made the purchase.
 

My eBay beta negative changes

There are some changes made in My eBay beta which make it less useful for buyers and unusable for sellers. Essential features for managing listings have simply been removed, and without them basic listing management is impossible.

Most of the sorting options have disappeared in My eBay Beta. You can no longer sort by number of bids, available quantity, high bidder ID, postage cost or item number: there are times when each of these is essential. The only sort options remaining are by price, time left or number of bids, along with the listing format filter.

Even worse is that you can no longer display items by shop category; when checking stock or bulk editing items from one shop category to another, this is an essential sort option.


There is now no visual indication that you have best offers waiting to be processed. Why not show “with offers” as the old my eBay did? Hiding offers aren’t going to get them actioned more quickly. For smaller sellers with a dozen items it’s not a problem as outstanding best offers are highlighted in green. But this simply doesn’t work for sellers who have more than one page of listings. The only way to check for offers is using the “View” drop down. In the same way unanswered questions from buyers are highlighted in red, but it’s impossible to sort by listings with unanswered questions.

The helpful drop down boxes with a suggested next action have been replaced with a “Take action” dropdown; adding an extra click-and-select to every transaction, this is a massive backwards step in usability. In the old eBay sellers would be presented with “Send Invoice” when an item was sold – not only simple to click but a visual indicator that they needed to take action on that listing. Buyers would be presented with reminders to pay or leave feedback, or even the suggestion to visit a seller’s shop.

“Take action” sounds great in principle, but “Send Invoice” or “Pay Now” is a much stronger call to action. There’s room under the “Take action” button for the 2 or 3 top actions, so it would make so much sense to display them.

Conclusion

The new My eBay beta is pretty; it’s just a shame it’s also pretty useless. The designers have done a great job making My eBay look swish but the usability people have forgotten it’s not just looks that count. My eBay is an essential tool but if it’s rolled out to all users in its current format, the best advice for sellers is to stop using it and upgrade to Selling Manager Pro. In comparison the old My eBay which is feature rich and works, My eBay beta is simply not good enough for managing selling activities.