[Exhibitman]

Ebay has made it nearly 10x more expensive to auction cards rather than offering them at fixed prices. Ebay charges $0.35 to list a $200 item for BIN and $3.00 to list an auction with a $199.99 minimum bid. If you want to do a $0.99 minimum and a reserve of $199.99, you pay $2.15. So do I post my ten weekly items as BINs with best offer levels allowing for someone to make an offer ($3.50 total cost to me) or do I put them up in auctions costing me $21.50-$30.00? in a weak market, where every cent counts, the up-front costs alone are a consideration for a casual seller.

The market on Ebay also sucks right now on most categories of cards. Lowball bidders are doing quite well. I'm throwing down very low bids on a lot of cards and winning a surprising number of them lately. Do I, as a rational seller, want to sell into that meat grinder with no price floor? Since I don't do this for a living, I'd rather keep the cards than throw them away at a loss or at little profit, which is what a straight auction often means lately.

No, sellers are responding to external and Ebay-based stimuli about as they would be expected to under the circumstances. Unless Ebay takes steps to reverse the financial incentives, the skewing towards BINs will go on.