eBay.com have announced their forums will be off-line between 4pm and midnight Pacific Time today for upgrades that are surely a decade overdue, and will bring overall user features to about the standard that was leading edge eight years ago.

I have a couple of issues with this round of upgrades (the first I can remember in over six years of using the site) -

First thoughts are to ask why they are doing this during peak daily site usage time – why take them offline for the evening session?  Why didn’t they do this during the early hours when most of North America is snuggled under the duvet?  It smacks of performing tasks for the convenience of the staff, and not the customers…

Secondly, the announced upgrades hardly bring the forums to the leading edge of the industry, nor even to the middle ground – it’s almost as if they are deliberately prevaricating over maintaining their lead in the market, or have become complacent about their position in the industry.

The announced “highlights” of the upgrade are -

• More Personalization and Layout Options. In addition to showing My World profile images, we’re providing tools that will allow you to quickly access those discussion topics that are most important to you.
• Time-saving Features. Hover over a discussion thread title and catch a glimpse of the conversation that’s taking place before you decide to click into the thread. We’ll also rotate through some discussion board posts at the bottom of certain pages that let you see what people are currently talking about.
• Enhanced Control Over Your Experience. Sort from newest to oldest, change the number of threads appearing on a board hub page, or automatically “quote” an earlier post.  The upgrade provides more ways you can tailor your experience, so that you get what you need fast.

Hmmm.  Sorry eBay, but eBid had all of that in Q1-2002 (at least, and maybe earlier).

Where are the Twitter and FaceBook inter-connections, sidebar galleries of hottest products by bids and watchers (pertinent to the topic under discussion), callouts to welcome newly registered members (again buyer or seller according to board), and all the other niceties and internal marketing features that are present on competitor sites?

Not good enough – certainly only 2 stars (and a one-star for delivery time).  Is it any wonder then that average user time on site and average number of page views per visit has collapsed?  Functionality in the eBay forums is very 1990s, and utilisation of them as a within-site marketing channel is non-existent.

I’d advocate enforced holidays for all eBay managers – ones where they are banned from logging into eBay for 30 days, and forced to go see other sites and what has happened in the web world.  Even their most modern plaything, the eBayInkBlog, despite being on a leading edge software (WordPress) looks like it was thrown together for a 1970s teen pop-magazine.  Not what we expect from a market leader, is it?

“eBay -the worlds favourite marketplace follower”, (no longer a leader and innovator).

Come back Pierre – before your brain-child becomes brain-dead.

Ed