Recently eBay introduced a new Bid History page. I must confess, I thought this was another gimmick. But I think there are some positive changes and improvements.

I'm very pleased to see that they brought back the exact feedback score rather than just displaying the feedback star. I like to know what experience the buyers I'm bidding against have, and frankly, I can't remember what every star represents, so this was a positive change for me.

The biggest new feature is the Item information on the right side of the page. Not only do you see the thumbnail picture, but also the title, current bid, shipping information, and a box to enter your bid.

At the top of the page it clearly states the number of unique bidders who have bid on the item as well as the total number of bids and, most importantly, the time remaining on the auction.

What I really like about this page, and I'm sure eBay is testing here before launching on the main Auction page, is One-Click Bidding. When you enter a bid in the box on the Bid History page, you are not taken to another page to confirm it (as you are currently from the Auction page). Instead, a pop-up window appears and the rest of the page goes into a washed out effect (similar to when you get a pop-up window on the Sell Your Item form) and you can confirm your bid here. There's no page load time, so this is great if you're sniping, or if you're not on the fastest of Internet connections. This is a change buyers have been requesting for some time now, and I think it's been well executed.

I have always been a faithful user of the Auction page for bidding, but I decided I would give using the Bid History page a shot. I used the refresh button (that appears when there are only 15 minutes remaining on the auction, same as on the Auction page) to keep an eye on the time remaining, and placed and confirmed my bid from the Bid History page. It was actually a lot of fun. I didn't feel distracted by other things going on (mainly because this page is very minimalistic and has no ads or fluff to it).

Unfortunately, all of these positive changes are overshadowed by eBay's Safe-Guarding Member IDs (SMI) change. Most buyers were unhappy with the Bidder 1, Bidder 2 idea, but they're not happy about eBay's compromise either. Initially eBay shielded all bidder IDs after the bidding reached $200 (or the reserve price was over $200) by replacing the User ID with Bidder 1, Bidder 2, etc. based on the order the bids were placed. This did not go down well in the eBay community where both buyers and sellers said they felt this was shielding shill bidders and removing a lot of the transparency from the site. (See AuctionBytes January 16th article about SMI at http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y07/m01/i16/s01).

So, eBay has responded with a compromise. Now you will see two random characters from the member's User ID with three asterisks between them (for example, auctionbytes could be b*y, c*t, or any combination of letters from within the User ID.) On the forum about the Bid History page, this is the number one topic of discussion. And it's not just buyers who are unhappy. Sellers are complaining that they are losing bids, even more so than when the Bidder 1, Bidder 2 change was first launched.

The reason was clearly put by Goldcoastbridal: "I have been confused over this asterisk thing for a while now and missed out bidding on a couple items I would normally bid on...the names like r**t seemed fishy to me and I thought they were screen names...did eBay send a message about this to all of its users informing them this was going to happen? I thought for sure the auctions I was watching were shilling!" Goldcoastbridal has a feedback score of over 100, so is certainly not a newbie.

This concern is echoed by other users on the forum, such as ehprop, who said: "What eBay has done is to add a cool tool that will gradually convince a lot of good people to shy away from many transactions that earlier would have seemed safe." And rskmgtpro: "I find the User ID masking for bid history information on higher priced items to be totally offensive."

One suggestion that has been made on the board is allowing an established, high-feedback buyer access to the full User ID of bidders he or she is bidding against (i.e. after the bidder has already placed a bid on the item). The suggestion is that buyers go through a verification process to gain access to this information.

Personally, I don't think eBay will go for this, however I do wonder why eBay doesn't just use the first and last initial of the User ID (so auctionbytes would always show up as a***s). This would make it easier for bidders to see when a user is bidding on a seller's items multiple times, or when they are bidding against the same person for similar items, but it wouldn't give scammers the full User ID (to try to steal the bid, or send a phishing Second Chance Offer, etc.). With the exact Feedback Score also displayed, the likelihood of there being two users bidding on the same item who have the same first and last letters in their User ID and the exact same feedback score is quite minimal. I think this would be a true compromise.

You can read all of the comments, as well as the original eBay announcement on the forum board: http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?threadID=2000430110&start=40

It's a shame that so many good changes have been overshadowed by this one issue. I do think that in general the changes to Bid History are a success. I think we can expect some further changes to the SMI policy, but I doubt eBay will return to showing the full ID as many eBay users have requested.