Speaking as someone who can’t let a day go by without checking if there’s a new piece of obscure Black Crowes memorabilia on eBay, the thought of eBay Mobile is pretty exciting. Not least because of all those auctions I’ve lost due to being away from my PC while some bounder nipped in at the last minute with a higher bid. Not that I’m bitter.
Last week, I wrote about the eBay Mobile WAP site, which despite an announcement by O2 is actually available to any UK mobile user with a WAP-capable phone. So I entered the address – www.ebaymobile.co.uk – into my phone’s browser, and spent some time trying out its features. But does it get positive or negative feedback?
The homepage is certainly clean and clear, loading up quickly and not overloading you with too many options. There’s a search box to get started looking for items, along with links to My eBay, Help and some information about eBay Mobile.
I’m not that impressed with the basic search function. Type in a query, and it comes up with a huge long list of items – in the case of the Black Crowes, 73 pages of them! They’re sorted by when their auctions end, with the nearest first, and there’s no way to change this, for example to resort them by price.
You have to be really specific in the search box to find what you want, in other words, or face wading through 70+ WAP pages, which just isn’t going to happen. That said, when you click on an item, you get a neat page showing its picture, price, time left, the name of the seller AND their feedback rating, and a link to place a bid.
However, to be fair to eBay Mobile, it’s not really about searching for items from scratch. Instead, it’s more about logging into your My eBay page to track items you’re already bidding on, watching or selling. Here, eBay Mobile is far more useful. After signing in, you’re presented with another clear menu screen with links to each of those categories.
From here, it’s easy to place new bids, although obviously it’s not as quick as if you’re sitting on a PC with 30 seconds to go in an auction. So I’d hesitate to use the WAP site for an item that I was hell-bent on getting, but as a tool for quickly checking the status of relevant auctions, it’s certainly useful.
It’s also worth looking at signing up for some of the eBay mobile alerts to keep track via SMS, although at 25p a pop they do seem rather expensive. I’d much rather pay a flat monthly fee for this kind of service, so I know how much it’s going to cost.
On the WAP site, eBay invites users to suggest improvements in the future. I for one would like to see a full mobile application that you can download to your handset, with more powerful search facilities, and maybe optimised for people bidding down to the wire in auctions, as that’ll be one of the key uses of eBay Mobile.
The WAP site is a good start, but here’s hoping the next iteration comes sooner rather than later. For more information on eBay Mobile, check the official website.
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