EBay Is Slowly Losing Its Soul

I stopped using ebay a long time ago. You can't find any deals on there any more. + now the difference in cost on the "deals" is so little, that its not worth it to take the risk of dealing with a possible scammer when you can deal with an actual company and have the added protection you get from using a credit card.

I continue to use eBay, but only for obscure collectibles and art that can't be found anywhere else. They're still irreplaceable in that respect.<p>Still, it's hard to imagine why they think spamming themselves with fixed-price auctions is going to be beneficial. If anything, it hurts them by drowning out traditional auctions. Fraud and flaky sellers are too much of a problem on eBay to use them for any item I can find elsewhere.

I feel that ebay "lost its soul" when it didn't respond to sellers gaming the feedback system. If you are not familiar with this, sellers would withhold feedback to the buyer until the buyer gave positive feedback to the seller. Now, there are buyers who give negative feedback to sellers without just cause, so part of this behavior is defensive but the essence is that there grew this distrust and ebay's "karma system" just broke down. I never saw ebay doing anything to fix this and bring a better sense of trust and goodwill in the community. Anyone else have a different experience?

eBay are just there to get more and more money out of you.<p>Every few weeks I get an email from them, I got one yesterday from them in fact. They generally contain something like this:<p>&#62;&#62; Fee changes<p>&#62;&#62; We will be making changes to our overall fee structure, including Insertion Fees and Final Value Fees.<p>With a link to the full changes: <a href="http://pages.ebay.co.uk/pricechange08/" rel="nofollow">http://pages.ebay.co.uk/pricechange08/</a><p>Even with my bad math skills, I know that if I sell a £50 (ok, £49.99) item on eBay UK currently, I would have to pay them £2.25 which is 4.5%, soon though, I will need to pay them £4.95, 9.9%, thats more than double, and doesn't even include listing costs!<p>What I want to know, is how they dare?<p>Though, I'm the fool, because I'll be using them to sell stuff in future, when selling things on auction sites, the more visitors means a higher price I will get for an item. (and the more I will need to pay eBay - god dammit!)

Sounds like a good opportunity for someone to come in and make an auction site that doesn't take 70 steps in order to sell something.

I was wondering when someone else was going to figure this out and write about it. I abandoned the site about 2 years ago.

If anything, they're rearranging deck chairs on the Hindenburg.