There are several issues that have hurt eBay in recent years.
1. BINs - When I started to put together my T206 set about 10 years ago, there were at least a couple hundred eBay AUCTIONS for graded T206s ending every week on Sundays. Now, you get maybe 10-20 AUCTIONS ending each week. Everything is an over-priced BIN that just keeps getting listed month after month after month.
2. FEES - It seems that whenever a rare piece (card or memorabilia) is listed on eBay, someone reaches out and contacts the seller in order to hammer out a deal outside of eBay. It has happened to me with leather football helmets so many times I can't remember them all. I once told a seller to let his auction run it's course and I guaranteed him that I would be the high bidder. He let it run 7 days and then pulled it off of eBay within only hours of it's ending. Sellers would rather cut a lesser deal off of eBay to save on the seller's fees. I wish eBay made it harder to pull an item from an active listing once there was an initial bid by a bidder.
3. SHILLING - Once eBay hid bidder's IDs, it made it harder to prove shilling. Once a bidder suspects shilling, they will usually stop bidding on an item and if it becomes a pattern, they begin to ignore a certain seller altogether. Now, there was always shilling from the beginning of eBay, but now they make it so easy to do without any recourse.
I think eBay should go back to 100% auctions. You can have a BIN also, but the item must be an auction to begin with. In other words, you can have a card with a BIN of $500, but it must be listed as an auction with a starting price less than $500, for example. Don't allow sellers to end an auction once a bid has been placed and let's see member ID's again.
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