Safari, so bad for eBay users
eBay is advising Safari users to switch to Firefox after repeated problems paying for purchases with the Apple browser. It comes as an online retailing monitoring firm warns that site failing to support all browsers risk losing business during the holiday season.
Troubleshooting site MacFixit says there have been compatibility issues with Safari and eBay for a few weeks, but over the past few days eBay has openly acknowledged the problems. The issue seems to be most common for Canadian and British users and crops up when you attempt to pay for goods through the automatic link to your PayPal account.
eBay is now throwing up an error message in these cases which reads “Your web browser may not be compatible with eBay’s checkout. Please try again with Mozilla Firefox.” This seems to be a company line as one Mac Fixit reader reports a technical support staff member telling him to use Firefox as a temporary workaround.
The problem seems to be inconsistent as some reports say simply repeating the checkout attempt will eventually do the trick.
Safari compatibility seems to be a recurring problem for eBay’s programmers. Last week the site launched a price comparison tool which, for now at least, will only work in Internet Explorer and Firefox. Another new eBay feature, which recognises Skype phone numbers, is also a Safari no-go for the moment.
The problems back-up a media release from web performance monitoring firm Gomez which points out the importance of serving every potential customer during the competitive holiday season:
As shoppers increasingly adopt new web browsers such as Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome, online retailers need to be sure that their websites look good and perform correctly on all web browsers – or risk frustrated customers and lost opportunities.
While a fairly obvious statement, it’s still a valid point. After all, Safari may only have a single-digit market share, but that could still be a huge amount of potentially lost revenue for a firm such as eBay which has revenues in the billions.
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