Situation normal...

We expect eBay to grind to a halt ten days after a cheap listing day, and even on the CLD itself, but today they've excelled themselves, breaking the site the day *before* the CLD. Many sellers are reporting complete inability to access any part of the site, though the problem isn't universal.

I have plenty of wine if anyone else has nothing to do ]:)

Unable to verify www.paypal.com as a trusted site

Just days after PayPal announce security devices to generate one time passwords to protect users accounts they have yet another security flaw. The SSL certificate used to verify that the PayPal site is secure is again warning users that PayPal is not a trusted site.



This is by no means the first time PayPal have had problems with certificates, in the past they have had issues with non-secure images on SSL pages caused by third party banner adverts. It really is time a company handling financial transactions for over 100 million users got their act together on security. All the time users logging into the genuine PayPal site get warnings they have no option but to ignore if they need to perform transactions it's no wonder they also fall for phishing sites.

Parlez vous rubbish?

If you've ever thought that eBay talked nonsense, here's some definitive proof from the French announcements board. With yesterday's Feedback 2.0 announcement posted at 5.35pm, pulled immediately and posted again at 5.46pm, someone at eBay really ought to figure out how their announcements' feed works.

Old news is no news

ebaypaypalblog reported the opening of Paypal's new UK office and a reduction in the withdrawl fee for amounts under £50, quoting a Paypal spokesperson's statement that this would increase trust and comfort for UK buyers. Such a great story was picked up by both auctionforums.org and eBayyer (lacking permalinks, scroll down to 5th January post, identical to source). The only problem? The story actually dates from October 2003. Oops :-)

Code soup

Yesterday's problems with Paypal continued this morning with many sellers reporting problems with eBay's Checkout. These problems made a welcome change from last week's Paypal problems, when new payments were not flagged as new, and from the week before, when eBay's auction management software, Selling Manager Pro, failed.

Despite being widely reported as if it were actually news, this kind of breakdown in site functionality is something that eBay sellers deal with every day. And it's about time it all got fixed. Properly.

Go on any eBay message board these days, and you'll find that "PNR" is some kind of in-joke. It stands for "page not responding", eBay's error page in case of server failure. And it's something that every eBay seller knows well, just as well, in fact, as they know that ten days after a cheap listing day, the site will grind to an over-burdened halt. Recent CLDs in both the UK and Canada had to be extended because their initial implementation was faulty. One has to wonder just what their programmers are doing, and whether they actually have a test server.

But it's not just the site architecture that's below par: its front end is horrible code soup too. With a recent report critising 97% of websites for failing accessibilty guidelines, eBay might be forgiven for thinking they can get away with the multiple nested tables, single pixel shim layout they've got at the moment, but it can really be only a matter of time before someone, somewhere decides to get the lawyers involved.

When was the last time that eBay's site got rewritten from the ground up? Not in the last seven years while I've been using it. I can understand that with literally millions of lines of code, this is a major task. That's why it needs to be done now. The current state of affairs, where each new feature breaks something and needs more bodges to hold it all together, cannot go on much longer.

For Cobb's sake, can we get this fixed?