Ebay’s wounds are partially self inflicted. The site is flooded with wholesalers and professional scavengers etc. Paypal is probably the real value there. Maybe spinning it off makes sense but they will kill Ebay in the process.
Often enough, “new crap” is not so much more expensive that “used crap” so Ebay may need to appeal less to value and more to uniqueness. It started as a site to trade Pez dispensers among the collectors. Now its a flea market of everything new and used. Amazon is better at new than they are because 1) you deal with only one shopping cart and 2) there is a tacit guarantee of satisfaction from the seller (even if Amazon isn’t really the seller).
If Ebay wants to make some improvements they may need to figure out a way to let people “shop” and pay only 1 time at checkout, and then EBay can divide the money up among the vendors the way Amazon does it. If I buy 20 things on Amazon I know it may come from 6 warehouses in 11 different boxes, but I don’t have to pay 6 or 11 times. And I know Amazon more or less stands behind it. Ebay’s social interaction rating system seems fair and they do guarantee most sales, but it still comes across as a mess because there is little uniformity, little over-arching comfort, and always the fact that in all things you need to deal with each seller individually. That’s fine for unique things but not for the general merchandize that fills up half their site. Worse, each seller provides different information in different ways in different fonts in different sizes in different colors. It may allow for individuality but anyone familiar with design and marketing would know it is not conducive to shopping. It may be great if you are looking for 1 special rare thing. But its not a go-to place for general commerce. Yet the site is full of all kinds of generally available merchandise. Fixing it may not be all that easy. They may need to split their site into the traditional “used/collectibles” and “general (new) merchandize”.
Ebay has had a cart for some time.