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Reflections on "Describing" StuffPosted Mar-18-08 08:20:53 PDT E-commerce-- and hereunder selling items on eBay-- is really a funny critter. As a collector of many different things (God help me), I find myself perusing many different eBay categories, at different times. Often I just end up shaking my head, and moving on. Perhaps I do this because I used to work "in the industry" (e-commerce consulting and web usability) and got paid to sit around and tear apart bad web site design. When I am looking, what I want to know FIRST, is the specifics of what someone is selling. I sincerely don't care about an Encyclopedia Britannica length discourse about their reputation, their history, their shipping policy, how to pay if you live in Tibet, what's in their store, what was in their store in 1873, blinking lights with alternative checkout methods, what their dog ate for dinner, their guarantee that their shipping labels will be written only with a turquoise Sharpie, and somewhere... buried in the middle of all this... is a "description" that reads merely "See scan." I don't think the decency filters here will pick up and bleep this particular phrase so my response is: WTF???? It's a simple thing. Tell me what your item is, first. Immediately. At the top. First thing I want to see is a picture and the words "This is a genuine 1882 toilet seat" (or whatever) along with size, condition, what comes with it and anything else you know about it. It is not rocket science. Trust me, if I am interested enough to stay on the page, I will read your encyclopedic musings on your policies and so forth. Of course, all this makes me wonder if I am actually from another planet. Why? Well, so many of the sellers with these "descriptions" have feedback ratings of 47-something million, and obviously are doing well. Maybe eBay descriptions are just a microcosmic reflection of the information overload of the greater world. Think about cable news channels, for a moment. There's a newscaster, but there's also an image box, and a couple of tickers across the bottom, and perhaps the stock market quotes in corner, and every now and then "coming up next" flashes on the screen, superimposed on the ongoing chaos. The other day, I was watching a trailer for some new TV show, and the thing I noticed (and yes, I actually counted) was that camera perspective and screen changed 43 times in a 60-second spot. That's about 1.4 seconds per "image" shown. Makes me think the entire world is caught up in a sort of cultural ADHD.
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