Doug and I have been Ebay members since April of 1997, and have nearly 11,000 buying and selling transactions under our belt. We've sold everything from (blush!) Beanie Babies, to Olympic pins, to Lord of the Rings movie memorabilia, with a few oddities in between.

I am confident that we pretty much know the ins and outs of Ebaying, although sometimes it seems I learn something new every day, by following the Ebay Discussion Boards.  Those people are the real heart and soul of Ebay, not the corporate umbrella.

When we first started on Ebay, it was a wonderful place, full of friendly users, who sent their items, and paid for their winnings, usually with a nice email to boot, happy to find what they were looking for.

About three or four years ago, Ebay began to change. Some target the beginning of the change to when the original found, Pierre Omidyar, sold the company. I think that's a pretty fair analysis, I just think it took a couple of years for the MBA mindset to filter down to the users.

And filter down, it has. Customer service has evaporated. Ebay places so little emphasis on it, they even let go seventy CSRs last month.  Any time you ask for assistance, you get a canned answer culled from keywords in your original question.  No human hands, heart or mind appear to be involved.

The feedback system has been tinkered with beyond recognition, and beginning May 1st, will be utterly emasculated, as sellers are no longer permitted to leave anything but positive feedback for buyers. Watch for sellers to leave in droves.

Ebay has also lost sight of the fact that these same sellers are also buyers. Nearly every hobby seller I have spoken to uses their Ebay "profits" to pour back into buying new finds for their own collection.

Ebay treats their users as if they are idiots. In 2006 they trumpeted a small 3% fee increase to the media. Well, for Ebay Store "owners", it was more in the range of triple. Their much vaunted fee decrease of 2008, also turned out to be a small front end listing decrease, with a massive Final Value Fee (sales commission) tacked on to the back end. Once again, instead of being the publicized fee decrease, some users saw their monthly bill go up as much as 50%.

Many sellers left at the time of the 2006 Stores increase. To compound things, when listings dropped, Ebay incorporated international listings into the US site, to give the appearance that listing numbers were unaffected, or even up.  

There are even anecdotally substantiated rumors that during the well publicized boycott of February 2008, Ebay pumped the numbers by setting up fake "test" users with 30,000 auctions or more. These auctions didn't show up in the usual searches, but did, once again, boost the listing count. Ebay attributed it to an "error" which added their Shopping.com users' items to the Ebay site in error. Convenient, eh?

Searches are another issue. The Ebay search engine is tinkered with more than a '65 Mustang. Even experienced users like myself have to go on the Discussion Boards seeking help to find items, often even their own. Ebay has experimented with many different search formats, including their latest,  "Best Match", which is a "fun" search to help users find things they "might" like, based on prior purchases.   Personally, when I search for Lord of the Rings collectibles, it irks me to have a  XXX Tracey Lord video show up in the mix. I'm a big girl ('tho not as big as,...um.... that!) and can set up my own searches, thankyouvery much.

So let me get my shopping done, via a simple, intuitive search, and stop telling me what I might want to see. It is my belief that most users come to Ebay looking for a specific item or type of items, and the additional clutter of Best Match drives users away in frustration and confusion.

In addition, Ebay is testing various forms of "rewarding" sellers. Sellers with the best feedback are supposed to be at the top of the heap in search results. Instead, there's been utter confusion, with the best rated sellers often being completely hidden or deleted from search results altogether.

The DSR (Detailed Seller Rating) stars have been another fiasco. Sellers fees can be based on their DSR rating. Ebay encourages bidders to leave a 4 for "good" service, but tells sellers that a 4 is an unacceptable performance rating. Even Ebay admits this is a conflict, but states it has no plans to make any changes. So failure is not an option- it is a given, since it is built into Ebay's skewed system.  A large seller who drops below a 4.5 rating can see a 15% fee increase, yet Ebay has popups for people in the process of leaving feedback telling them that a 5 is only for exceptional service.

Ebay's Discussion Boards are a goldmine of good users, and useful information and suggestions. Ebay employees/board monitors seldom post to the boards. Even just having a couple of full time employees devoted to doing nothing but providing an Ebay presence on the boards would have created tremendous goodwill. But now I fear it is too late, and an actual Pink (so called because Ebay employee posts have a pink border) would be heckled off the boards as a Band-Aid for all the other problems.

There are so many, many other problems....nonpaying bidders (easily solved if Ebay would vet new users and limit them to one ID.  YahooAuctions enforced this), Paypal chargebacks, phish accounts (I have personally received phish emails on a test ID I have never used, which arrved within seconds of registering it. There is NO way this phish came from anywhere but inside Ebay),  Asian sellers hawking fake merchandise, the list goes on and on.