As interested parties can see in the bidding history, I tried to bid on the advertisement. The first time I did this I "naturally" had to fill out a lot of registration forms before I actually came to the page where I was asked to review my bid (which was a strange decision in itself: "Do I want to review my bid, or should I look for a 'confirm' button first?"). At that time I was so into filling out forms that I totally skipped the part where my bid was shown; I went straight to the "enter your ID here" field.

Only *after* entering and submitting that information, and upon seeing my bid displayed on the page where the adverisement was shown (a familiar page now) did I see that my bid was totally wrong!

I had entered a (low & safe) bid of $2.25, but I did so in my local currency format "2,25"; in The Netherlands and some other Europen countries, we use a comma to seperate the two parts.
eBay interpreted this as "$225" totally ignoring the comma and increasing my bid with a factor 100!

This misinterpretation happened, even though just after eBay asked me what country I came from, it switched the interface to the local language, Dutch. So there is a Dutch version of the interface, eBay knows that I am Dutch, but still it didn't realize that the Dutch way of entering currency is quite different from the English way, nor does it ask me when I enter a bid in a different and syntactically incorrect way!

I was lucky to be able to cancel my bid, tried a few times more with small increments, and finally gave up (at $5.00, I am cheap I know), slightly shocked.

Posted by: Peter Boersma on July 30, 2002 05:42 AM

 

Peter,

Thanks for the great story about eBay. Obviously some companies still have kinks in their systems. Scratch that. All major web sites have kinks. What is more interesting is that eBay, one of the most popular web sites on the web, has this kind of problem.

Sorry for the pain, but thanks for bidding!

Here is a deep posting...

The Usability of eBay's Checkout Feature -- "The article briefly highlights some frustrations sellers have with eBay's Checkout feature."

Posted by: John S. Rhodes on July 30, 2002 07:21 AM