I’m massively impressed with ebay, who ever came up with the idea of selling all your junk online deserves a good pat on the back. I’ve bought a number of items on ebay, most notably a guitar amplifier that I had wanted for ages but hadn’t been made for years. The price was astounding too, a new one would have cost £750 but on the second hand market it only cost me £350.
I am getting a bit hooked on it though, it is like having a high street on your laptop, loads of collectibles and discontinued stuff going for a song, and what was junk to me has magically turned into cash.
The site itself is well laid out, I’ve never had any complaints about speed or ease of finding things, it’s perfectly logically set out and the search facility is very effective. It could do with a more specific search capability, for instance I was searching for a Marshall amplifier and on entering Marshall got a load of results for Marshall Mathers a.k.a. Eminem. A “Marshall not including Mathers” search would have helped me out loads.
The three problems I’ve had so far have been the billing, the site down time, and the refresh of new items. I got sent several final demands for money (it only costs a few pence to advertise) when I had paid the bill, I did however receive some very apologetic emails from ebay so I wont hold that against them. The site always seems to be down on Friday mornings between 9am and 11am for “essential maintenance”! The last and most irritating is when you newly list an item, it can take several hours before it appears to other users on the site. This is apparently because of some indexing cycle that hunts through their database to pull out new items and is slowed because of the quantity of items and users.
The international search facility is also a big help, you can search for items available to the UK, or if your really stuck you can just follow the links to ebay in Germany or America etc and ask if they’re prepared to deal with the UK.
The rating system is good, it does allow some trust to develope between users and encorages honest and speedy trading.
On the whole I’m massively impressed with ebay and I do believe there problems are down to the popularity of the site. If I were setting it u
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I did mention there was a small charge for advertising, in the section about them asking for payment.
Yahoo is OK, but I've found I can have several people bidding on things at ebay and not have a single viewing on Yahoo.
You basicaly pay for the amount of people likely to see your add, Yahoo is free because very few people use it.
May 9th, 2001
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