What happened to people making offers and asking questions on ebay?

[ricktmd]

Ebay has done a terrible job with their categories. It is difficult to search for Sports cards without doing a word search. The categories used to plug you into Pre 1930 baseball cards or similar. Like many things ebay does it makes the site worse and more difficult to use. Even the custom searches that used to be fruitful have been invaded by what ebay pushes not what you search for. If you want to look up 1920 W522 you do a word search, and it gets you there, sort of. There is no sense to try to look through their mixed-up categories relating to Sports Memorabilia. As far as communicationing with sellers most are uninterested and could care less. Ebay has helped create this atmosphere of over pricing, apathy and seller disinterest.
As far as selling via auction or Buy It Now. I agree they are different mainly because there are 3 types of buyers. BIN only, Auction Only and people that do both. It is good to toggle your items back and forth between BINs and auctions to get new eyes. I would disagree that auctions necessarily do better in terms of sales then BINs. Sometimes yes and sometimes no. If you try to auction an item starting at 149.99 for a 149.99 value card it is my experience that a bin has about the same odds of selling. If you choose to start the auction lower you may get more bids, even past a BIN that sat in your store for 2 months.
There is so many listings on ebay that stuff gets lost and with ebay pushing what they want you never know. Sometimes you land in the algorithms air stream and your item gets pushed to Google and Bing. That is when ebay is really helping you get views
I am scaling back selling. If I have a valuable sports cards to sell I tend to consign to an auction house. On most other types of items ebays return policy is absolutely insane and unfair to the seller. Revenue and profit comes from buyers. Sellers are treated like they are, replaceable. The few big sellers are treated a bit better. In the end ebay is still a good resource and if mined correctly can yield good buys. As far as comparing it to the partnership it had with sports collectors in the past it is completely different