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Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.
We had a customer recently who wanted to buy a quantity (20) of an item, something we don’t usually have occur. The buyer came to an agreement with us, added the items to his cart and clicked on “Request Total from Seller”, and we discovered we couldn’t discount anything but shipping – which wasn’t enough to accomplish the desired discount.
So we called eBay and found after 2-1/2 hours on the phone that they are totally clueless about how their own system works – or doesn’t, in this case.
And setting up a discount in the listing is fine if you’re selling no more than 3 of an item. When we suggested eBay change their “Send Invoice” seller response, there seemed to be a lot of confusion about WHY, HOW and “who needs that kind of thing?”
So “usability” in eBay’s dictionary means “It’s doing what we want”, rather than “does it make it more likely that people will buy things?”. No wonder eBay isn’t growing!
All they need to do is define all these glitches and bugs as “features”, and we’re all set!