Sunday, February 28, 2021

Ebay gets more complicated

 Selling an electric motorcycle vest on Ebay.  Picked it up from a friend's widow who was getting rid of all her motorcycle stuff after her husband died.  Some stuff I could use myself, some stuff I'm putting on ebay, mostly I was doing her a favor.

However, I listed it on ebay; it didn't sell; and today I went to relist it.

Ebay: You have to enter the "outer shell material".

How the hell would I know?  There is a list of about forty possibilities including leather, polypropelyne, jute, satin, etc.  It's a freaking heated vest for a motorcycle.

Fine, I'll just pick one.  Nylon.  


Ebay: You have to choose a Department.

What the hell?  Why?  It's listed as a women's heated motorcycle vest and it's listed in the correct category for heated gear.

Fine, I'll just pick Women's.

That isn't an option.  The choices are Men, Teens, and Unisex.  WTF.  So now it's listed in the Men's Department.


Ebay: There is a conflict with your title.  Your title says the item is New but your listed says it is used.  Please fix the conflict.

The company that made the vest was called NEW AGE MOTORCYCLE.  Gah!


Add to that the fact that they now want my bank account information because apparently they aren't going to be processing payments through Paypal anymore (which is weird because they own Paypal) and it's getting to the point where it is more effort than it is worth to  sell stuff on Ebay.  I have sold significant amounts of stuff through their service over the past twenty years (100% and over 500 positive feedbacks) so I'm not a newbie to this stuff, but if it's going to be this much trouble, maybe I'll just throw the stuff away.

Have you noticed that everything always gets more complicated?  Basic high speed internet browser then has to add the capability to process email and edit documents.  Boom!  Neither basic nor high speed.  Netscape Navigator did this.

Honda Civic becomes a luxury sedan  as they add a new feature here and there.

Ebay requires all sorts of extraneous information to sell your stuff and won't let you use the payment processor that they own and that they have been using for years.

Apps on your phone suddenly don't work the way they used to and you can't figure out why, because they "upgraded" them and someone thought it would be a good idea to move the search button from the top of the screen to a hidden menu.

Why don't companies leave well enough alone and recognize that making you product more complicated and harder to use sometimes isn't a good tradeoff for more unwanted features?


Update and on-topic: I regularly visit The Aviationist, over at https://theaviationist.com/.  He has interesting articles on various aviation topics.  I got the Top Gun: Maverick lego video from him and left a comment about how awesome it was yesterday.  I comment there semi-regularly but as far as I can tell I am one of the only commenters.  The most I've seen on any post is two or three so there isn't a lot of comment traffic (no idea how many people look at the site).  That being said, today I could not comment because the process has changed.  Used to be if you clicked "post as a guest" it would let you type in username and email, then he would moderate your comment.  Now clicking "post as a guest" asks you to sign in and verify your email.  I could understand a site that had lots of comments and lots of spam (hey Reason, your BS faux TDS libertarianism isn't the only problem with your site) but given that this doesn't seem to be the case, why on earth make it harder to leave comments.



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