I recently sold auction style a Find-R-Scope 350.00 buyer said do not send invoice nor put inside or outside the box, then he didn’t have money then came up with my shipping didn’t go to Delaware WTF. Relisted item and he bid again with a different account. I took listing off and put it on buy it now and let the next bidder down make an affer and I accepted for $55.00 less as I just wanted it gone by then. Fuckbay feed me 23?? for auction style early removal then took 18% + plus every other fee. I just started selling again on this platform and last item ended yesterday and am severing the relationship nor will I buy again on ebay. They can piss off!!!!!!!!!!!! Ebay said they would refund the 23.?? but did not. Sure hope that stock dives and they stay in India.

ShitBay is Dead right now…has been for months, as of March 2024. Unless you “promote” your listings the time and effort invested in any one is 90 +% wasted. The fact shitbay is flat out null says they are still losing substantial buyers, and their deadness is progressively permanent. There are no viable “alternatives” because selling Online is hugely competitive and .biased against sellers. Shitbay sellers repel and drive off buyers via their exorbitant prices. Moderate and affordable vendors are necessarily ousted. shitBay deals the favoritism card big time. They bank their dying dinosaur on desperate, marginalized and unknown sellers.

The only people making money on Ebay are the criminal thieves who don’t pay for the actual item. But then they probably list it and don’t ship it so they make even more money.

That is a really great summary of why eBay is indeed declining. Thank you so much for sharing it Jim.

I’ve been selling there for 20+ years with some buying too. The period up to about 2009 were the halcyon days but then the various recessions struck. The decline since then has been continuous – certainly for sellers.

The reasons are partly Ebay’s fault but also those changes I mentioned above. To be specific:

1. Ebay’s corporate incompetence, a failure to evolve their strategy to reflect evolving market trends and of course, greed/short-termism. Yes, they’ve since tried to make some course corrections but the indications are they’re too little and very possibly too late.

2. Government intervention. Here in Europe, governments have become ever-more desperate to see even minor online trading as a cash-cow to be milked accordingly. Taxes, charges, levies, raised shipping charges – they’ve all played their part in destroying seller margins in many segments and driving up prices. This, for buyers, has made the platform increasingly uneconomic.

3. Too many players. In the late 20thC and first decade of the 21st, Ebay sellers and buyers were roughly in balance. Since then, the pop-culture of “buy and sell, it’s easy money” has infected millions and now everyone in the world is an Ebay seller. This is pushing up the prices at source, as people fight each other to acquire items they can sell and that in turn is forcing fewer and fewer auctions and more and more absurdly priced “buy it now” offers. Many Ebay sellers haven’t a clue, paying whatever it takes to get items then adding their required percentage profit and putting the item on Ebay at a price that you can be 100% sure means it will never, EVER sell. As Ebay fills up with laughably priced stuff, buyers go elsewhere looking for their deals – and they have ever more options to do so.

4. The growth of the “Ebay owes us…” mindset with many sellers. This falls out of ‘3’ above when instead of applying standard business analysis to try and identify why their objects arent selling (often to do with having no market or over-pricing or both) they turn on Ebay and demand explanations or start blaming the buyers.

5. Desertion of buyers. Touched on above. Virtually none of my clients now check Ebay for deals, regarding it as being full of ludicrously overpriced items. Ten years ago, perhaps 75% of them would have checked it regularly. The buyers have simply fled in droves to other forums.

I’d like to end cheerfully but I suspect this decline is irreversible. I now only sell odd items on Ebay simply for convenience if they’re of low value. Wish it were otherwise.

Same here. No more free money from me. Government shortly to scrutinise accounts receiving eBay money where they will question you about what little profit you are making whilst searching your home, confiscating your items and putting an end to it all anyway courtesy of government regulations meant to make benefit recipients and pensioners suffer on account of suspected and presumed criminality. The trouble with eBay is the amount that comes back to bank is an amount where your bank doesn’t see the ebay fees which are now horrific, the postage, the postage extra costs, the article itself, which are unseen to the excited arrest officer for your sin of not notifying. It really isn’t worth it and you are not allowed to have that much money coming into your account. They start to cut things off getting you into an even deeper mess as they “investigate”. People have already ended up homeless due to this simplistic approach

Totally agree. You have to have free stuff that you’ve acquired in order to actually make any money.
sold a piece of electronic equipment for $75, after shipping and ebay fees… I get $41. Luckily that was something someone gave to me…