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

[perezfan]

Originally Posted by Topnotchsy

In the last bunch of years ebay:

• Removed the wildcard (*) search option making many searches more frustrating and difficult
• Tried to make sure you don't miss anything and so made it far more difficult to just search for what you want by expanding the results in many ways
• Made it that sellers can send offers to people who viewed they listings, even if they did not choose to watch them
• Made it easy to list someone and leave it on eBay for ever for no cost

All told, eBay has created a huge percentage of items priced at a price that they will never sell, at no cost to the sellers. Then made it harder for buyers to sort through the listings to focus on the ones they want. And even if you do that work, you can get a slew of offers on items that you had no interest in (hence not watching it).

It's becoming harder and harder to just find what you are looking for. I know for me, as someone who is an avid collector and spends quite a bit of time on the hobby, I am spending less and less time with eBay. It's simply too unpleasant to want to deal with all the time.

This describes my experience to a tee. The amount of time I spend searching eBay is probably one fifth of what it was 5+ years ago.

And even more so, with regard to selling. I have completely abandoned selling on eBay, and now only consign to auctions or sell outright to collector friends.