Little things, little unnecessary things that slow us down and get in our way, that never needed to be there. They’re just someone’s idea of how to squeeze a bit more profit out of us, with no concern of how much it might inconvenience us and PISS US OFF.
Like, for instance, ebay’s constant little changes, all designed to do exactly what I just said.
There’s a feature where, if you want to mark an auction to check back on, you click on “Add to Watchlist”. BUT BEWARE. The person who put up the auction has the option to send you AN OFFER, of a little lower price, if you add it to your watchlist. This only applies to Buy It Now items, not to bidding auctions.
If you want the item but would like to offer less, there’s that option. You can do it at will, and offer whatever you think is a good offer. All fine and good. But if the seller has chosen to send everyone an automatic offer who has added the auction to their watchlist, and you have added that one and a bunch others that you’re interested in for whatever reason, to your watchlist, suddenly your screen has, right at the very top where you can’t possibly ignore them, a scroll of offers that can get pretty long.
Now, if you never wanted these UNSOLICITED OFFERS in the first place, to get rid of them you must first click on them one by one, wait for the offer to come up, refuse the offer, return to your ebay dashboard to the next offer, do it again, and so on until you’ve refused all the offers.
Then you click in all the little boxes beside all the offers you refused, then go to the top and check the Refuse Offer box and click on Refuse Offers. In other words, you have to refuse each offer three times. Once on the sellers auction and twice on your ebay dashboard, and you had to do all this crap because you added the auctions to your watchlist.
This has become such a pain in the ass annoyance that I will no longer put anything on my watchlist that I’m not really, seriously interested in purchasing, and that’s because it might take me awhile to decide. I might be comparing different auctions of the same item, or I might be looking for a different version, or I might just be concerned about my budget and just bookmarking the thing for a reference.
But I will no longer watch-list anything “Buy It Now”, ever again. Thus, ebay’s greedy little ploy in total disregard of it’s nuisance value is neutered. Take that, ebay. Haha!
The moral to this story is that many small victories add up to one big fat one.