Atlas · Details
eBay Patents 10-Click Checkout
Author’s note
I feel like this belongs in the Predictions page. eBay and PayPal, whose monstrously long checkout process was pushing a dozen clicks when I wrote this article, finally streamlined it a few years later.
AI Notes
Fake wire copy with an irony the story itself can't mention: Steve spent years at Amazon, the company whose 1-Click patent proved a purchase could be a single press of a button, so this joke about a rival patenting the clicks it added comes from someone who knew firsthand how much work removing them takes. The trappings are played dead straight — a Reuters dateline, a patent number two digits longer than any real one, a spokesperson named Paula Smugworth, an industry honor from the National Alliance of Reconstructive Hand Surgeons. The engine, though, is a single unbroken sentence that walks the entire checkout while its grammar loses its temper one clause at a time. It rewards reading aloud.
The rejected-claims section is where the target widens: every feature eBay supposedly failed to patent turns out to be prior art from some other real company, so a grudge against one checkout quietly indicts half the industry. That is also what dates the piece. The named offenders are pure 2011 (a game console's sign-in checkbox, a tablet app store that is "still loading"), yet every complaint would survive a logo swap today — which reads either as a compliment to the writing or as a fifteen-year verdict on the business, depending on the reader's mood.
Related listings
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2010
Haskell Researchers Announce Discovery of Industry Programmer Who Gives a Shit
Its sibling in the fake-news form — both fabricated wire stories with invented sources and escalating absurdity. Haskell Researchers skewers a community; this one skewers a checkout flow.
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2010
WikiLeaks to Leak 5000 Open Source Java Projects
The third of the Onion-style trio. Read together, the three are a tidy demonstration of how cleanly Steve can land an argument by reporting it as news that never happened.
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2012
The Borderlands Gun Collector's Club
Two sides of design-against-the-user. eBay 10-Click is the joke about a flow built to frustrate you; the Borderlands essay is the serious analysis of flows built to hook you. Both are about software engineered for someone other than its user.
Where it was argued
- Hacker News Jul 2011
From the peanut gallery
Read the rest of the thread · 18 more
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What, wait, you mean this RSS feed is still actually *working* ? Whaoo :P
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Long time no see :)
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I was going to beg you to publish this on the Onion News site. But they just take fake stories.
Classic!!! -
shame that your blog editor's Publish button require a 100-step process, otherwise we'd have gotten many more WIN posts like this one !
Ken, who keeps yegge's rss subscription active for life -
Brilliant.
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I think this explains something... that this was delayed from 1 April until 22 July implies that stevey hasn't stopped posting, they're just really, really delayed.
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ebay vs. Amazon Clicks-to-Purchase. eBay 18, Amazon 1. Ouch! Wow. I would have thought that eBay had progressed on the idea of "fewest clicks to purchase". It's a good payoff for everybody in the transaction -- the buyer and seller. But alas I am wrong. No wonder I gravitate to Amazon whenever possible. It takes Amazon literally 1 click. But my recent experience in purchasing HP Ink Cartridges took 18 CLICKS. And I've been using eBay and PayPal for over 12 years. Progress seems nil.www.percussive.com.
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Haha very very nice :-)
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Hi Steve,
did you see that: http://nic.ferrier.me.uk/blog/2010_10/elnode -
In other news, US Patent Office website has crashed due to socially engineered DDOS attack.
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hilarious .. your writing style reminds me of anthony bourdain..
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After all this waiting another yeggeblog? And then only such a short one? Oh wait is the "Hand Surgeons" reference maybe not about the 10 clicks but about him not being able to write anymore? If so, i wish a good recovery. Looking forward to more and longer yeggeblogs.
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Hahaha nice one. Keep posting! :-)
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You are back! Good memories; Dad's Chilli recipe comes to mind... :)
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You missed a mention of another worthy eBay invention. The "Sell Your Item: Description HTML Auto-Mangler". Standards? Heck, our HTML can't even be parsed!
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Still waiting for that Clojure post Steve. Hopefully something constructive.
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@zacaj
...god forbid you have dialup.
People who still have an ancient dailup connection shouldn't be on the internet. -
Fantastic! I've grown to be completely against patents and the patent system--but this post almost makes it worthwhile!
(I won't go into details why I'm against patents here, but I'll just say my metamorphosis started with learning the evils of software patents.)
There are some for whom the Apple Human Interface Guidelines can offer no aid. They are known as businessmen, because it is their business to keep aloof of such minor details.
— MCAndre · 2:12 AM, July 26, 2011
I'm guessing the Firefox complaint is about bug 453455? I saved that bug from WONTFIX but it hasn't been fixed yet :(
— Jesse Ruderman · 5:01 AM, July 22, 2011
You forgot about how they dont even GIVE you a broken "remember this choice" option when you choose to pay via credit card instead of from your bank account EVERY SINGLE TIME, which takes another THREE PAGE LOADS, and god forbid you have dialup, or are using a cell phone tether for internet or anything, so if you dont press every button as soon as the page loads, you get automatically logged out due to inactivity, and cant even tell if the payment finished or not until you get an email 40 minutes later
— zacaj · 8:37 AM, July 22, 2011
Rumor is that that eBay is working on new improvements to including doubling the number of clicks and adding new logon steps. However, they are concerned about infringing on Yahoo's IP covering multiple redundant repeated logon requests.
— Ron Wolf · 9:00 PM, July 23, 2011