eBay have announced that (at least on eBay.com) . The name and URL will also be changed from “My World” to “User Profile” and the pages are supposed to be a place where you can tell other eBay members about yourself and promote what you sell.
Currently have a choice of six colour themes and six optional modules for Listings, Bio, Shop, Reviews and Guides, Guest Book and Favourites. Of these almost everything is going including all customisation options.
• The Reviews and Guides module will be accessible only through the Reviews & Guides landing page
• The Favorites module will only be accessible through My eBay
• Customization capabilities related to page layout, the addition or removal of modules from public view, and theme color will no longer be available
• Guestbooks and Neighborhoods will be retired
• Current URLs to the MyWorld pages will be replaced with a new user ID-based URL. (https://www.ebay.com/usr/[ebayID]). Visitors will be automatically redirected to the new URLs.
Personally I think My World pages (or as I should start calling them “User Profiles”) on eBay desperately need content. There is little in the way of useful information or interesting content on the pages. You used to be able to click a user id anywhere on eBay to see the seller’s feedback, nowadays it’s just annoying to have a My World interstitial page which is a shame as many users have great About Me pages that would be worth visiting.
Users have never been able to usefully edit their My World pages to add content. In their current form it would be better to scrap them entirely – a cross between the worst possible About Me page and the user’s Feedback Page just doesn’t serve either purpose. I guess I should reserve judgement until the new pages are live but I have no great hopes for the pages being enough of an improvement to actually be worth looking at.
It would be a start if eBay fixed the display problem on the My World home page – very rarely does it actually display anyone’s profile picture. In the mean time for the My World/User Profile pages to be really useful they need to be interesting. Here are some suggestions for eBay, feel free to add more in comments.
• Allow links to their external Social Media profiles
• Allow links to their external Blog and ability to import posts with RSS
• Allow customisation with free text to parts of the page. Even better amalgamate them with About Me pages
• Display comments from users made on eBay Community Forums or the eBay Answer Centre
On the last My World update, Sue said: “It’s another half-assed implementation of a feature that could have been good”. Let’s hope that this update is a little better.
One Response
To be honest, I think the whole concept is a complete waste of time. People are on eBay to shop, not to socialise.
(Hopefully) eBay must know something different to be spending time and resources on it… 🙂