eBay Case Study

I actually use eBay frequently, mostly for buying and I had never tried this Flex application. I first opened my eBay account and placed an item easily on my watch list. I always found it fairly simple to locate and track my watch list items by logging into my account and either going to the "My eBay" button at the top and going to "Watch List" or going to the "Watch List" button on the side. I had never previously used the Flex app for eBay.

When I first tried to download I was not impressed. I use Firefox and I guess I have the most up to date version (or at least I thought I did). When I tried to download the app for Firefox it told me it was not available for my version of Firefox. So I had to open up Safari and then downloaded it from there. It then opened up a new window and asked me to re-login to my eBay account. After doing so, the little eBay button popped up on the left side of my browser bar. I clicked on the browser bar and nothing happened. I clicked 2 more times before I realized another Safari window opened and was again asking me to login which was kind of irritating. I logged in one more time and finally the app would function. I opened up the app and noticed a small, simple window opened displaying my active, watch list item as well as my purchased, "ended" items. If I clicked buy now, the standard ebay window would open allowing me to purchase the item.

All in all, I found that the flex app was I guess fairly simple to install but I will probably never use it because I prefer Firefox over Safari. Also I don't find it that hard to login to my ebay account and use ebay from the web.