Making the Most of a Minimal Budget. Contact me at: skintsailor@yahoo.co.uk or on Twitter: @skintsailor

Sunday 5 March 2017

eBay Woes (Slow Response)

Is it just me, or is anyone else getting ever slower response times from eBay?

When trying to bag a bargain, you have to cast the net wide on your searches to make sure you trawl up the mis-spelled, the mis-placed or the generally badly advertised listings. The classic way to find the items no-one else can.

That means to drag up a lot of dross and you get into a rythm of quickly scrolling down the listings and filtering the gold from the poo.

But I'm finding it ever more difficult to do this, as the time it takes eBay to redraw a page is taking absolutely ages.

It's not my "up to 8Gb" connection either, the same massive slow-down occurs at work (during lunch break and for scientific purposes only, you understand).

I'm at a loss to explain it. Unless the adverts that eBay attach to every page have recently become massive and pre-load a huge video every time you click on to a new page. Maybe they're collecting mega amounts of meta-data, every page logging my activity in minute detail.

The fan on my laptop goes bonkers every time it displays a new page too, then quietens down after a couple of minutes (the time it takes to be able to scroll a page smoothly).

All very strange and totally frustrating. So much so I'm looking at alternative sites now in order to bag bargains.

Bye Bye eBay, you're no longer the useful site you used to be.

UPDATE:

Deleting all my browsing history didn't do much good.

However, adding a advert blocker to Chrome seems to have had an effect. I'll report back after I've had a few days running in the new configuration.

2 comments:

  1. Have you tried running an antivirus program on your computer - just to check all is ok?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Alden, I always use an anti-virus program.

    The problem is only on ad-intensive websites but especially eBay. That pesky ad in the sidebar uses up a lot of bandwidth to load and still uses up bandwidth when loaded. If I hover over it I can see the cursor flashing like billyo.

    So stopping them from showing on my browser has saved a huge chunk of data and therefore speeded thing up quite a bit.

    I guess they are loading stats about your browsing habits too which doesn't help, hence the reminder emails saying I looked at such and such days ago.

    Dealing with eBay is a better experience now the ad-blocker is in place.

    ReplyDelete