I feel your pain, but there is nothing one can do. Ever since John Donahoe became eBay CEO, the orientation of eBay shifted even more (something started by former CEO Meg Whitman) and they tried to adapt parts and ideas from other successful marketplaces like Amazon, CraigList and others. Of course they also wanted to capture buyers, in the event totally ignoring the facts of *why* both sellers and buyers (in many cases BOTH in one person) had left eBay in the first place. Just a few examples:
- eBay shop owners were suddenly treated like muck, faced increased overall fees, then dropped from search results, finally being added after having to pay additional fees. All the time eBay openly stated that shops on eBay were soon to be closed alltogether, then suddenly it was all 'a big mistake' before they fell back to claiming that shops were useless anyway.
- Both sellers and buyers could once exchange feedback. Nowadays only buyers can leave feedback, meaning that sellers threatened or left standing in the rain (feedback exploitation, non-payers, etc.) can not warn others anymore -or- defend themselves against incorrect claims.
- At the same time, the new star rating system was introduced with all its flaws, totally ignoring common sense. So if somebody was displeased by post office strikes or post office/transport fee increases he could simply state that by dinging the seller's DSR rating, in the end damaging a sellers reputation for something he/she could not control or influence in any way (next to not being able to see WHO had dinged their rating and for WHAT and of course without possibility to have an incorrect rating revised).
- Multiple changes in search routines and result presentation caused frustration on both seller and buyer side. A large database screw-up followed, itself pretty much unnoticed and covered up by the results of eBay's next big 'modification' in searches. After a few months sellers noticed that instead of showing 'real' results based on keywords, eBay also introduced presentation of 'similar auctions' or 'buyer also looked for...' results in a way that totally drowned real results in favor of spamming the user with stuff he was not interested in.
- all that went hand in hand with eBay's official new idea of business, away from "used junk" and towards large amounts of brand items, preferably new.
It all boils down to the fact that eBay nowadays not only *prefers* large lot sellers of new (brand) items, they openly support these and greatly neglect their former customer base (... after all only the folks that made eBay big in the first place, mind!). Different listing fee ranges were the start, lots of the same new (brand) items result in much lower listing fees per item. As next came that the already pretty lousy support (both at help desk or in search results) for 'junk sellers' was cut back even more, once again in favor of the larger new item sellers.
If one now adds the explosive increase of nearly uncontrolled keyword abuse, item misrepresentation and auctioning of fakes and reproductions mixed with the (intended) incapability of fighting such matters, one can clearly say that eBay has long fallen from its throne. Other sites have always analysed steps taken by eBay and LEARNED from the errors made by their competitor, so it's no wonder that sites like Amazon or CraigList improve further while eBay is slowly going down the drain.
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Note: The above is merely a compressed form of (eBay) published facts. I am not a negatively biased former seller and/or customer and even my recent clash with eBay regarding my suspension for claimed 'disruption of service' has nothing to do with what I wrote above (after all I only used the eBay forum as way of helping sellers and buyers identify their items).
