eBay

Ease-of-Use

eBay makes it easy enough to search for an auction or to launch your own auction. But where do you go if you want to retract a bid, report a deadbeat bidder, change your credit card billing information, or find out more about selling or shipping? eBay offers a huge amount of content and services on its site, but most of these individual pages are buried well within the site. Unless you know the specific URL for a page, you might find yourself clicking hopelessly through multiple pages, trying in vain to find that particular feature you’re looking for.

Fortunately, eBay offers a single page that links to all the quasi-hidden pages on its site. That page is the Site Map page, and you get to it by clicking the Site Map link above the Navigation bar on the eBay home page. eBay’s Site Map includes links to more than a hundred separate pages—which makes it worth bookmarking on its own. In many cases, it’s the only way to get to where you want to go.

Another thing that eBay makes hard to find is the method of contacting the site’s administrators if you have a problem. In the old days, eBay used to let you e-mail them directly for help—but not anymore. Now you have to click the Help link on a particular page and then click through multiple help pages until you get to a contact form. If that’s too much hassle, you can go directly to the Contact Customer Support page, located at http://pages.ebay.com/help/contact_us/_base/index.html. You’ll still have to do some clicking (to identify the type of problem you’re having), but when you click the Continue button, you’ll find a Submit Email form into which you can enter your question. Click the Submit button and your question is sent to eBay support staff, who will respond via e-mail.

While the eBay staff can be helpful, they’re often busy. An equally good source of information and advice—and one that’s often faster than going through official channels—is the huge universe of fellow eBay users. eBay makes it easy to communicate with other users by providing a number of topic-specific discussion boards and chat rooms.