First impressions of the new My eBay beta

August 10, 2008

The new My eBay beta is now available for users to check out and is looking great. The clunky headers from the old eBay are gone and have been replaced with a newly-,designed tabbed page complete with drop downs to access the key sections.

However when it comes to using it, it’s not nearly as feature rich as the old My eBay. While the aesthetics have obviously been given a high priority, it doesn’t appear that enough thought has been given to how people use the site.

My eBay beta positive changes

The entire My eBay look and feel has been updated; the graphic designers really have done a good job in making the page easy on the eye with newly designed icons and section headers.

The introduction of lists is a great new tool. You can create lists for gift ideas, products you want to research, a wish list of items to buy, in fact a list for pretty much anything. The only drawback is that you can only add items to a list if they already appear in My eBay. Do I really want to add things I’ve already added to my watch list or already bought? Apart from that the only items I can add are those I’m actually selling - not a great source of gift ideas, but I’d hope it’ll be expanded to enable items to be added from elsewhere on the site in the future.

Shortcuts replace the links section of My eBay, but they’ve been expanded so that you can now add your own links to this section. Do you want instant access to your blocked bidder list? How about a link to the PowerSeller board? You can even add links to sites off eBay: maybe a link to your online banking would be useful?

The ability to customise My eBay to display the information that’s important to you has always been great and the new My eBay allows you to do this. The new My eBay takes customisation even further to the extent of allowing changes the colours of the page headers.

Sidebar adverts have been removed from My eBay: no longer are they slowing down the page load and hopefully it’s not a temporary move. Adverts in My eBay have largely been irrelevant to users and leave parts of the page unusable until they have loaded.

My eBay beta neutral changes

The summary page is simply a summary of summaries. It adds nothing and doesn’t give enough information on anything to be useful. This is a page that might as well not exist bar the fact that it displays buying and selling totals and they’re no longer available anywhere else. The only thing it might do is scare buyers into curtailing their spending as it highlights how much they’ve already spent.
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Written by Chris Dawson · Filed Under Featured, Site Changes, eBay.co.uk | 22 Comments