YakShaving

Attention venture capitalists that have some extra money to throw around, or motivated and interested entrepreneurs:

You should invest in creating a good auction site. Wha-What’s that you say, eBay already exists and has monopolized the online auction market?

Have you ever tried to USE eBay recently? as a buyer OR a seller? The user experience (forget the actual customer experience, that’s even worse) of eBay is mildly better than immersing yourself in boiling canola oil.

It’s funny sometimes how a company can have, for all intents and purposes, a monopoly on a market, as is the case with the internet auction market… but deliver an absolutely miserable user experience just because it can.

Brief message to the kid sitting in the marketing department of eBay who is scanning google blog search and happen to stumble upon this post.. Please run along and give this urgent memo to your boss:

– If your designers are designing for usability, they have utterly failed and need to really turn in their badge immediately.
– If your developers are optimizing for speed, the site runs like molasses… O(n!)… I need to find out if there’s a Vetta vintage out there with my name on it, not solve the damned traveling salesman problem with brute force search.
– If your designers are web artists, they are sadly just not very good at their craft, because the site is soooo old school and reminds me of Yahoo! in the mid-1990s.
– Your emails that come to me if I’m watching an item are HORRENDOUS, and unreadable on a mobile device.
– Saved searches are unintuitive and somehow return back matryoshka dolls even though I’m looking for a vintage bike saddle.
….Tell you what. If I get a chance and free time (probably wont), I’m going to whip up a redesigned page and help you out.

I understand eBay might feel like they’re safe because they have a monopoly on internet auctions. But the second a better designed version is released, I am willing to lose my eBay reputation score in order to switch completely.