Global Geek News Blog

This weekend I spent part of my weekend shopping online for a new tv. While shopping I decided to do some price comparison on Ebay. After I purchased a Toshiba tv from Amazon, I went back to Ebay to look for some video games. When I got there, I realized the horror of Ebay’s move to the new ‘Web 2.0′ movement. While I have been a fan of the Web 2.0 movement for some time as I believe it is user friendly, Ebay shows how you can turn the upgraded design into a consumer nightmare.

For those of you who haven’t been apart of what I believe is a beta experience, it is a search nightmare. Since I am typically searching for video games to find old games or bargains, I will use that as my talking point.

The old design is far more user friendly as it had better subcategories. When you look up video games, It gives you several categories such as Accessories, Games and Systems. Under those you had subcategories to refine your search for specific platforms. If you wanted to do a generic search on Xbox 360 games, you would just click the Xbox 360 link under the games category. That ease is now gone.

Ebay has replaced this with just the overall main categories(Accessories, Games, Systems, etc.). Now if you go to look for a game, you don’t get to filter by Console, instead all games are lumped together in the main category which returns over 150,000 listings. You now have the option to refine your search by things like ESRB rating, Genre, and price range. I will analyze each of these.

First, filtering by ESRB ratings is foolish. Each category still returns tens of thousands of results which makes it nearly impossible to find something that you aren’t looking for. While this could certainly be useful for parents looking to get games for their children that are worried about their content, but unfortunately this is not a majority of users. When adding search features, you should target the largest majorities first before you cater to the smaller groups of users.

Next, filtering by Genre is practically useless. While I will admit it could be helpful for people who only like particular genres of games, it again does not target the majority. If like myself, you are looking for Xbox 360 games as their auction ends, you typically aren’t looking for anything in particular and would not want to limit your results to a certain genre. This could be turned around to allow you to choose a series of genre’s so that you can eliminate genre’s you may not like such as puzzle games. This would be far more useful.

Last, filtering by price range is practically the most useless of all of the new filtering options. If you don’t know what you are looking for, how do you know how much you are willing to pay for it? Also, if you are looking for something and now the approximate price it typically goes for, you could be excluding a lot of possibilities such as used items and bundles. There is more I could say about this nonsense, but I don’t have that kind of time.

With subcategories gone in place of this new filtering system, Ebay is effectively eliminating the crowd of bargain hunters to target the smaller groups of searchers. While going back to the old system would be a great improvement over the current system, I believe that with a better search model, which allows you to select multiple subcategories at a time while using smaller details to filter the search would be a far more effective solution. Improvements on the old system can be made, but this is a huge leap back and likely to cost the auction giant numerous sales and customers.

Ebay, this is your fair warning: It is better to include rather than exclude.