[thecatspajamas]

The only cure is to go back to the old fee structure where the listing fees were proportional to the starting price on auctions. You get fewer people willing to jack up the starting price when it costs them money up front to do so, regardless of whether the item sells or not. Let them list for free, at any starting price they choose, and this is what happens.

Sellers like this guy view selling on eBay more like playing the lottery than running a business, except in this case, they don't even have to pay for their scratch-off tickets.

Oddly enough, this was actually a factor you could see keeping several startup competitors from gaining traction early on. They would often advertise how it was FREE to list on their site, compared to the greedy eBay who actually charged you to list your stuff. As a result, they were flooded with items priced starting at high-end market values and going up from there, very little of which actually sold. So the Free Listings they were using to draw traffic to their site wound up killing them in the end due to human nature. If there was no outlay of cash for listing fees on the front end, sellers didn't really care if their unrealistic pricing never actually resulted in a sale, and casual visitors to the site were put off by the high asking prices vs. what they were seeing on eBay.