eBay has always been about change, and anytime a company expands as fast as the auction giant has, growing pains are endemic. But this year, it seems as if they are changing things so fast that I can't seem to keep up.
The constant changes -- and sometimes the unforeseen consequences of those changes -- are making the lives of a lot of sellers miserable.
Here are just a few of the things that have been messed up with my little eBay operation recently:
- The billing on my account was fouled up for more than a month.
- The font sizes and type styles on many of my listings have been changed, willy-nilly, by eBay's software -- making many of my listings difficult to read.
- For no apparent reason, the Category area on all my listing forms began showing the selected category twice. I'm pretty sure they only charged me for listing in one category, but it's still worrisome.
- And the customer service when you complain or ask questions is less than adequate -- you tend to get lots of soothing words via e-mail and no real explanations or resolutions to your problem.
And I know I'm not alone in my feelings. I found this message to eBay management -- typical of many others -- on one of the seller bulletin boards:
"Stop the constant tweaking and fiddling with the software. These changes invariably break stuff that had been working OK previously!! If you do make changes, implement quality control measures to catch problems instead of relying on users to report problems after the fact."
David Steiner at AuctionBytes.com told me that "eBay's constant fiddling is like having someone come into your office while you're gone and rearrange the furniture -- on an almost daily basis."
And it doesn't look like things are going to be slowing down anytime soon. The "Announcements" section on eBay is jam-packed with messages about upcoming changes.
All this gives me the impression that eBay's core operations -- those that interface directly with sellers and buyers -- are being handled by "computer people" with little selling experience, each one seeing only a tiny piece of the big picture, and almost oblivious to the fact that a small tweak here or there can create mushrooming problems.
Take my billing problems, for example. Out of the blue, my selling fees ballooned by an $300 to $400 or so, with no explanation given by eBay.
eBay makes its money by charging tiny fees with each listing, so the monthly statement of even a relatively low-volume PowerSeller like our orchid operation goes on forever. Frankly, I didn't have the time to spend hours with a calculator trying to figure out what went wrong, and where. But I knew I had hundreds of dollars in unexpected new fees, and I wanted to know why.
When I inquired, a customer service rep told me via e-mail that: "As previously announced, eBay is introducing a new system for billing your selling fees. The new system changes the way eBay bills for subscriptions. If you have a subscription to a Store or selling tool, like Selling Manager or Seller's Assistant, you will see a one-time subscription adjustment charge appear on your first invoice in the new system."
Yes -- but, my bill doubled overnight!
I went looking for a better explanation than the one given by eBay's rep. One of the bulletin boards quoted another eBay representative as saying: "We are aware that some members' accounts that have been migrated to the new billing system have inaccurate balances, due to fees and credits appearing twice. This issue will be resolved in the next few days, and any incorrect billing transactions will be reversed."
My account remained out of whack for weeks. And judging by the anguished postings on eBay's Technical Issues Discussion Board, hundreds, if not thousands, of other sellers were in the same boat.
After a month or so, eBay finally changed my outstanding account balance back again to the proper amount. I have to admit that the action was a load off my mind.
However, there was no direct communication whatsoever from eBay about the change. The fact is, if I ran my business that way, my customers would be heading for the exits.
I had a nice conversation with eBay spokesman Hani Durzy on this topic, and he told me that "one of our goals is to make sure the marketplace can always scale so that eBay can grow as our customers grow."
"It's through regular changes and fixes and feature introductions that we make it possible for sellers to scale upward," he said.
But do they actually test these things before implementing them? The short answer is yes, but some of these changes are really complicated.
Durzy said the billing system tweak was not just a routine change, it was the installation of a whole new system to replace the one eBay had been using practically from the start.
"We had to implement a new system so that it wouldn't interfere with the day-to-day operations -- so the process took years -- including lots of communication with the community," he said. "We tested over and over and caught many bugs, but unfortunately, we didn't catch all the bugs. We wish that there hadn't been any, but bugs and glitches can be a fact of life."
Durzy made the point that once the problems were discovered, eBay didn't actually deduct money from sellers' accounts with the wrong amounts. Sellers were not actually charged until the problems were resolved, and that is indeed what happened in my case.
"We would have liked it to go smoother -- it was a difficult time for our sellers," Durzy said.
Font Follies
The font problem in the listing descriptions began in mid-July and some of my listings are still messed up. Like a lot of sellers, I strive for a uniform look and feel to our listings, an appearance that expresses pride and professionalism. Consequently, we use a single font and type size, and we create clean, uncluttered item descriptions. We use 12-point type for readability.
But eBay's glitches converted some of our listings and some paragraphs in other listings into 8-point type, what a former editor of mine used to call "mice type" -- practically unreadable to anyone over 40. Some of the fonts were changed, too. It's a time-consuming chore fix a single listing. Now consider when you have upwards of 100 listings.
Fortunately, that problem too seems to have disappeared as quietly -- and as mysteriously -- as it came.
I know that eBay management has good reasons for trying to improve things -- and good intentions. But I still think things are simply being changed too fast and haphazardly.
You can see that, for example, when changes are made to a listing category and seller complaints ensue -- and then things are changed back. This happened with the Pottery and Glass category. After a storm of protest, eBay issued this announcement:
"After a complete review of Community feedback and several weeks of key performance measurements in the Pottery & Glass category, eBay will restore the recently changed sub-categories effective the week of July 12 "
eBay is making these changes (called "Category Rollups") to promote its Item Specifics feature, which allows sellers to provide additional details in pre-determined fields. The idea is to make eBay more use-friendly for consumers doing product searches.
"Buyers wanted a more flexible way to find items -- by searching more than one attribute at a time," Durzy said, adding that the Pottery and Glass category was the only change that was reversed "and it really wasn't working better there."
Still, as an individual seller, it's easy to focus on one's own problems, forgetting that eBay is so huge -- 332 million listings in the second quarter of 2004, and more than $8 billion worth of goods sold.
"In an ideal world we could run glitch-free," Durzy said. "But occasionally glitches are going to happen. We have teams of people dedicated to keeping the site up constantly. And one of the reasons is the constant optimizing."
"With a community of 114 million registered users, we are never going to be able to do anything to the site that doesn't get some people riled up."
That's probably true. Despite the staggering number of transactions that take place without incident, my opinion remains the same: Slowing down the hectic pace of "optimizing" just a bit would allow all of us sellers to catch up with any changes or problems, and just run our businesses for a few months before the next wave arrives.
Beth Cox is a contributor to eCommerce-Guide.com.
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