Ebay & Paypal Changes & How They Effect US

Was just listing a bunch items and still licking my wounds from getting totally confused over recent ebay changes.

So I am changing BIN listings to auction and remembered some years ago I was stressing over the fact that I had to change all my ebay listings from auction to BIN listings. And now I am going back again.

Just highlights many of us dislike change. We get use to doing something a certain way and we get very use to it being that way. Then someone throws a change into it all that seems to mean nothing but makes a big change the way we do business and messes up everything when things seem not to be broken and there is no need for change.

Several years ago I had a small store with 300+ items and ebay ended them all and insisted I make a change to all of them before I could relist them. I never did it, I threw them into a couple boxes sold them and never sold fied price again!

Sometimes ebay doesn't think these changes through.

Some of the areas I find myself in concerning social inter reaction would make your mind boggle. I do it by choice and handle it with relative ease. But one simple change to an ebay policy and I loose the plot. Just do not have the ability to think clearly with such a simple issue.

Personally I am sick of things changing so fast, its not just ebay & PayPal its everything. They just can't leave anything alone these days. If it ain't broke why change it? We are now being soon forced to NBN Internet as an example. ADSL works fine here but it will be soon gone. But what frightens the pants off me is ebay managed payments. If it comes here (Oz) and forced on all ebay platforms it will kill my business. I do not want sales money going in and out of a bank acc. with ebay managing it. I'm used to PayPal and frankly like PayPal. Recently when you view a sold item all the options there vanished like view record even send invoice from a paid item had gone. ebay reps knew nothing about the change. But it affected the way I do things, Luckily this time those options reappeared a week later. Also like when they changed the sold page last time and all the adding of sales at the bottom of paid items had vanished. Now I am used to hub but how long till that is ditched to? KGV I'm with you on this I simply hate changes call me old and set in my ways. But I get used to things the way they are and hate changes with no consideration to the end users of the platform, the sellers. For one thing some of their pages could use bigger fonts! Times new roman size 4 you need to be superman to read the text. That is my rant for tonight!

Many folks here do not understand software development. Software companies do not desire change, changes are INCREDIBLY costly. Think about just testing. Every revision of the code drives a huge amount of expensive testing. Software companies testing cycle can easily exceed a month or longer and involved hundreds or even thousands of computers and users. Big changes, like a major revision, can increase these numbers exponentially. And then new code also typically drives additional cost for support. All manuals, helps screens, troubleshooting charts, have to be updated and of course people need to be retrained. After a big change the support phones can ring off the hooks for weeks. So no, software companies do not stay up at night looking for ways the change their code base.

In regard to Duncan's post, software change is often driven external factors. Operating systems change, hardware manufacturers change the way their components work, new devices come into the marketplace, customers change, markets change. The software has to chase all of this, failing to do so makes the software obsolete.

Folks should appreciate just what it takes to design, develop, and bring to market any technology. It is a high risk cycle from start to finish. 'Hitting a moving target' barely describes what it really takes. And no matter what you do, the development you just invested in will have a life span of about 6 months (at best).

Believe me, tech companies would LOVE to be able to develop something and not touch it for a year.
Don

Don - I beg to differ. ebay and many businesses maintaining Web site modify them continually - for no good reason. They RARELY focus group / user test their sites. They are designed, built and modified again and again by techies who have no idea what a user's views / preferences / practices are. That's why many of them are very user unfriendly.

Company websites that have some salesperson, secretary, or loading dock person doing their website might make changes like that.

But I assure you that ebay NEVER changes anything without reason. You should see what they do just for revision control...it is overwhelming what they do to limit changes. Anyone who suggests a frivolous change would be looking for a new job.
Don

Hi Don

I agree with you totally. The general non-technical public has no idea what is involved in software and hardware development, especially software. They think it is like making a toaster, once on the market no support. If it breaks, buy a new one.

Back in the 60's it was predicted that software development would become more costly then hardware development by the late 70's. I don't remember who predicted it, but that occurred much sooner.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of software that is developed and sold by individuals and, in my opinion, poorly designed and almost no support.

Regarding software support, I worked with Banking and Point-of-Sales. When I retired, the greatest thing was getting a solid night's sleep The worst technological device invented was the "Beeper".

Jerry B

So to bad for the little guy using an ebay feature daily for his business for some time and used to it then that feature gets wiped and no explination is ever given about the changes. Especially with ebay and their own reps don't know what's happening. The way they are changing the search results is no good for example. You see the same picture with several different prices from different sellers and have to spend time looking through crap to find what you really want. Try finding a dvd for instance, I looked on ebay for one. The sellers there had terribly high numbers of negatives. I would have looked on Amazon USA but was Oz has been blocked from buying directly off Amazon usa. So I went to Amazon Oz found the dvd finally. Went to buy it and it was sold through an american seller on the Oz site! Stupid as I could have bought off the American Amazon site directly but wasn't allowed. Another dumb change.

I read the Bangkok Post regularly for the new Tech offerings,
last week a techy reviewed a new External drive on the market, and failed to give either the price, or the capacity..........

I've also wondered why say, ACDSee cannot sell me a past product of theirs,
I am willing to pay current price for an old version.

I've also wondered why say, Ford cannot sell me a past product of theirs,
I am willing to pay current price for an old version.

Imagine telling Ford that they should continue to sell (and support!) previous car models. Yikes. But, yes..it would be great to walk into a showroom and order up a new 1964 Mustang

But sticking with the car analogy since folks seem to be better able to grasp tangible things…

I can rebuild a flat head 6 cylinder in my sleep. I have years of experience with them and I have all the tools I need. But when I walk up to my new car in the garage and open the hood, I do not know even where to start. Hell, even though I am a motorhead, I am not sure that I can even identify all the components sitting in a 2019 engine compartment. But does that mean that car manufacturers have screwed up? Just because technology and time have moved forward (and I have not) means it is justifiable to place blame on the car companies??

Don

Hi Don

I would prefer a '55 T-Bird and if necessary a '56 My second choice would be a '65 GTO.

My wife has a Buick LaCrosse. I am almost certain that in the Aerospace days we put less electronics in a fighter jet than what is in the Buick. Every time she wants to use an option, she has to go to the dealer for lessons. I don't know what car the "Owner's Manual refers to.

Jerry B

Hi Jerry!
Of course who knows what a new 'retro' car would look like (and run like) if they built them today. Lots of government regulations in the 50 years but I guess we can blame that on the car companies too!
Don

Hi

Speaking of dumb changes, look at MicroSoft. They deleted a whole lot of "productivity tools" in Office because, as rumor has it, a few major customers did not like the features. There are thousands that used the tools and are now ticked off. What use to take a single click now takes two or more clicks if you can find where MS put the function.

Even with Visual Studio, they couldn't leave well enough alone. There use to be separate packages, VB.NET, C#, etc. Now it's all bundled into one package and takes forever to load a project.

In my eyes that is not how to run a company.

The best QA (Quality Assurance) I have ever seen was performed by a friend. He went and got the maintenance man and set him in front of the terminal with the instruction booklet. Every thing that was not clear was changed, including software. The result was a great product.

Jerry B

Jeepers, sorry I asked.

Hi Don

A retro would not be even close to the original.

I saw a program about Industry. I was surprised that you can get a brand new DeLorean just like the old as they have original parts warehoused.

A friend had a baby blue 65 or 66 Mustang convertible. He sold it to a guy in Florida who, from what I hear, did a nice restoration job. One of the hurricanes knocked down a large tree on top of it, totaled.

The Buick dealer was selling a restored GTO for $60,000. Darn I only had $50,000 The cars back then were huge. The GTO took up the whole floor space.

Jerry B