Spanspek

I just bought—tried to buy—an Audix D6 microphone.

The seller had the wrong address registered with Paypal. So when I tried to pay, nothing happened except for Paypal debiting my credit card. The email address was not registered with Paypal, so the transaction could not be completed. I spent days sending messages to the guy to fix the problem. He didn't.

I wasn't worried because I couldn't get ripped off. But the seller claimed he was (at the time of writing, is) leaving for Asia for a month and wanted to ship the mic. So why didn't he just fix the problem in a reasonable time? I tried four times to pay and each time could not complete it.

To add insult to injury, ebay's autobot accused me of not paying (because the seller had not accepted payment 7 days after the end of the auction). I sent a lengthy message referring them to all the messages sent back and forth and a copy of an email from Paypal showing my payment.

In the end, the guy cancelled the auction, which I hope fixes things with ebay, and relisted ... at a slightly higher price than I paid (US$1.50)— cheeky. It still came in under A$200 so I bought it (again). But what a to do.

If you ever read this, Lance, I don't want bad karma on ebay, so I won't leave a negative rating (if the mic turns up, that is it arrived!), but you're an idiot and I don't want to deal with you again.

Does anyone else think ebay Australia's new summary pages and searching are awful?

I don't have screenshot so I can't illustrate the difference. However, take a look the musical instruments summary page. The "sub-categories" used to be listed with the number of items on offer in each. That was useful because if one noticed that the number of items had fallen, I might decide that there were few, if any, new items to look at. Now I have to open the listings to see the total number of items.

Certain "search" pages have tools to narrow the number of items based on criteria related to the category. This is good. However, the "new" search tools allow the user to choose only one criterion, or to open a "choose more" panel (via an AJAX call). The whole thing is now a lot slower and requires many more page loads than used to be the case.

You'd think ebay would want to reduce the number of page loads per user. After all, fewer page loads means less stress on the servers (or more users before a server crashes).

For example, I'm looking for a new (well, new for me) laptop. Here's the laptop search page. Take a look at the left sidebar with the search tools. Wouldn't it be great if you could select multiple criteria right on that page instead of doing multiple page loads or clicking "Choose more" and then having to click through an AJAX-loaded interface to select your search criteria?

As with everything on the internet, your mileage may vary. I think it sucks.