Thursday, January 22, 2009

The "New and Improved" My eBay

On January 20, we all were dumped into the "new and improved" My eBay. Each time I was defaulted to the new version in recent months, I opted out. Like everyone else, I now have no choice.

My saved searches are very slow. Even my saved searches page loads very slow. Until now, I could click on my saved searches and get results within around one second. It now takes four to five seconds to get the results. Exactly how is this better???

I can deal with the new page setup. I just don't like it that my searches are now slow. I have been having fits today trying to run my searches. Are they wanting to completely drive me away? I am not selling on eBay, but I am still buying. Do they want me to stop?

There is a lot of unhappiness on eBay's message boards, especially the My eBay message board:

http://forums.ebay.com/db2/forum.jspa?forumID=73

Just click on the link and view the titles of the message threads to get an idea of the level of unhappiness. Some people are reporting that the new version is sucking up nearly 100% of their computers' CPU usage, which means that their computers are slowing to a crawl.

I gained some useful information from the message threads. First, the Google Chrome browser is the only internet browser that works well with the new version. Why exactly would eBay redesign an important page to work with only one browser which is not the most widely-used one? I quit using Microsoft Internet Explorer several years ago when I could no longer do my eBay searches quickly. I switched to Mozilla Firefox, which has always been fast on eBay. Now eBay has fixed it so that Firefox is slow. Therefore, I must either quit using Firefox or quit using eBay. Hmmm......

The second piece of information I learned is that eBay has not yet changed the international sites. Yes! I logged into eBay via the eBay Canada site, and my searches run just as quick as ever! I bookmarked the link to My Ebay.ca, and I'm going to run my searches from there at least until they pull the plug on the old version.

The "new and improved" My eBay no longer has the option to see the full ID of the winning bidders under the auctions not won page. That is definitely not an improvement.

EBay claims that 90% of its users were already using the new My eBay. Really? I guess all of the 10% who weren't already using it are all of the people complaining on eBay's message boards. I'm not going to start a poll on this topic, but I really want to know how many others were still using the old version. Post a comment and state either "yes" or "no" to whether you still used the old version.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

yes, i was using the old version. i'm not the most frequent ebay user, but i haven't really noticed what has "improved" for me on the new one.

Anonymous said...

Yes, I was still using the old version til the last possible moment and then was switched over. I noticed that the high bidder info was gone and I don't like the new version. I have always thought that statistics can be manipulated so it doesn't surprise me that ebay says only 10% was not using the new site. What else would they say? Nobody wants to switch over so we're doing it for you?

Jennifer White said...

Usually "new and improved" means that the product has been made worse, and they hope we won't notice. I was at the store buying a product around six months ago. Nearly all of the packages had "new and improved" on the label. One package remained with the old label that did not have "new and improved" on it. I decided to compare the contents, and the package with the old label had more product in the package. The company had reduced the amount of product and hoped that we would be fooled by the proclamation on the new label! Needless to say, I purchased the product with the old label.

I do think eBay is fudging the statistics with stating that 90% already used the new version. They had probably defaulted all of the inactive accounts to the new version and counted them in the statistics. I had been defaulted more than once in recent months and opted out. Inactive accounts would not have opted out since they are inactive. Duh.

Kathleen said...

You are exactly right- it is hideous!