I spend a lot of time – here or even without venting it publicly – complaining about the unhelpful, customer-adverse rather than “-centric”, bureaucratic mess that Amazon has become. But eBay tends to be no better.
I buy a lot of CDs on eBay, when prices are more attractive than on Amazon – which happens especially when I buy in bulk from a given seller, because I can get rebates on combined shipments, an advantage that Amazon doesn’t offer. Payment through paypal is also very easy, two clicks and it’s done. And there are other attractions to eBay. But eBay is like Amazon: such an obdurate, bureaucratic mess in some aspects that it is absolutely infuriating. As satisfied as I am with getting my CDs cheap, I woudln’t put my life on the line to save eBay if it was threatened.
I’ve recounted here the asinine stupidity of the translation “dildo” that they implemented back in 2015 on some of the German listings. If you want to know how Handel becomes “Commerce” and Till Eulenspiegel becomes “Till Owl Mirror”, go read it. To this day this grotesquerie continues.
Another problem that appeared one day – past exchanges of mail show that it had already started in October 2016 – was with the Summary page. That’s the page – or rather, the pages – that recap the objects you are following (“watch list”), or those you have purchased. That or these pages all of a sudden were taking hours – well, maybe a minute, which in the time of the internet seems like hours – to load. Scrolling down a page was so slow you thought it was mired in wax or something. Or whenever I made a change to one of the pages, like suppressing an object that I had been watching: hours to load again (and some spooky jumping from page to page in the process). Paying my bulk purchases became a nightmare, because when I needed to suppress from the list of purchases to pay those that seller had not yet invoiced (it happens with some sellers I do regular custom with): hours to re-load with each suppressed item, so imagine if I had to take ten off the list. Infuriating.
From the little I could make up of it, it had to do with some script or scripts – for ads, maybe, I’m not sure – that were endlessly running while the page was loading and slowed down everything. So, of course, I contacted eBay. And, of course, the response was: “it’s not us, it’s you. Empty your caches, delete your cookies, use another browser, check the settings of your antivirus. It’s not us, it’s you”.
Yeah, sure: so why was it doing it ONLY with eBay, and with no other website, not Amazon, not Wikipedia, whichever browser I used, even the already obsolete Internet Explorer 11? They didn’t care, “yeah it can happen, it’s not us, it’s you”.
Sometimes, you feel that those people are hired and trained and paid not to solve problems, but to deflect requests and throw the hot potato out the office window. Of course, that attitude, “it’s not us it’s you”, isn’t very conducive to examining if it may not be “us” after all, and fixing whatever problems.
I gave up and was left to mumble and grumble against the inconvenience of eBay and the incompetence of its staffers.
BUT! Wait. This is not a post just to vent and complain. This is one to say that one should never lose hope and optimism. THINGS HAVE SUDDENLY GOTTEN BETTER WITH EBAY ON THAT FRONT.
First, a few months or weeks ago, I noticed that the loading and scrolling of the Summary pages got fine! What a relief. Now, the price to pay was that I couldn’t delete items from those pages anymore, the link to delete didn’t work. But okay, I could live with that better than with the sticky loading and scrolling. But, more good news: now, just recently, the delete function was effective again.
Problem solved, then.
Now, I will NOT say “thank you eBay”. I’ll say: “so, after all, it WAS you, and not me, not my caches, no my cookies, not my browser, not my antivirus? WHY DID IT TAKE YOU SO LONG TO FIND OUT AND FIX IT???? And have you learned the lesson? I bet you haven’t”.
Now, how ’bout fixing that problem with the translation dildo, you know?