So I have a very love-hate with eBay. I personally see eBay like this:
Do you remember when you were a kid and you went to a parade and it was all razzle dazzle with fire trucks and horses and little cars and people throwing candy? Well it was great right? But what made all of that work was the behind the scenes stuff like a guy at the end of the parade scooping manure and a street sweeper cleaning up all the confetti and candy and trash. And those behind the scenes people who you probably didn’t see because you had gone home made it a great event. And yes, this is a long story but bear with me.
One of eBay’s biggest failures is that they don’t fix things and another is that they don’t implement well.
To me a well implemented new concept goes something like this.
IDEA ——>> BETA TEST ——–>> IMPLEMENTATION MANAGEMENT ———->> MAINTAIN FOREVER or RETIRE
So any of their great ideas from years ago should either be GONE or still maintained.
This week has been no exception in eBay failing to manage implementation and failing to do proper maintenance. They are CRAMMING to get all their updates for the GDPR that took effect in Europe on May 1st — but do you want to know how long eBay has had to do these changes? TWO YEARS!!! So all the downtimes and screw ups this week – why?
They have had MASSIVE downtime since Monday and while they may be working on things that are not GDPR related that are causing these, it just makes them not look professional. I mean everyone’s store showing wrong yesterday. Yes, that was kinda funny but can you imagine how many people freaked out at the possible bill. They upgraded every store I have and some of these, that jump would have been hundreds of dollars a month so I totally get why people called them right away and what a waste of their customer service time — just a waste due to failure to test and implement.
I am really hoping eBay gets their act together but I think it will take tossing out a bunch of their top dudes as the issues are too deep to not get a big reset in order to fix it.