Ebay’s Megalomania

In: user experience

20 Mar 2003

Jeff Chan:

"Unlike Amazon, eBay is not an innovative company. Amazon has constantly improved the shopping experience by introducing useful features like collaborative filtering, personalization, book browsing, and web services.
eBay, on the other hand, appears to be coasting on its monopoly position, and not too smoothly either. The reputation system is not robust. There is no scaling of ratings by dollar amount of transactions nor any use of network flow algorithms, or even a two-level system that Amazon uses to rate reviews. The numerous service outages, which directly impacts their bottom line, reflect poorly on their technical management.
The listings are an abject mess once you drill down below the top-level categories. It is true that items on eBay are hard to categorize, but some form of filtering can be useful. For example, when browsing servers, I want to be able to filter by the number and type of processors, memory size, number and type of drives etc."

Browsing on eBay is so useless (at least in the product categories I’m interested in) that the only way I use the site is through My eBay and search. And everyone marvels at their request to pay to be able to use their web service.

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I'm CEO of an online trade publishing firm in the marketing and defense verticals. We try to make news and data digestible and useful in an environment that is more noisy each day. This personal blog mixes my thoughts and interests on politics, business, software, and more, based on my business and personal experiences. Over the years I have posted items that turned out spectacularly wrong, and a few posts that stood the test of times better. Personal views only.

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