They started charging big fees and ticked off their steady customers / business owners. Many went over to Amazon.
To add to that, private sellers. I sold a LOT of items on Ebay for several years, but the fees on everything (including a fee on shipping charges (?), which Ebay had nothing to do with) basically made Ebay unprofitable and untenable for most private sellers. I haven’t sold anything on Ebay for almost four years and it’s now primarily an additional online venue for direct sales, a venue for retail resellers and the prices aren’t all that good.
Not sure what percentage of the EBAY sellers this might affect, but I can’t help but believe that Goodwill has killed off a bunch of EBAYs business with their major changes in recent years.
Goodwill now has their own auction site and they have teams of people that now filter through the donations for anything of real value so they can place it online for auction. They watch their customers shopping habits and in turn look for those same items during their scans through donations. They now use EBAY to research their pricing (like their customers would do) and have severly restricted what is actually placed out for the public to purchase. This has killed off many EBAY sellers because Goodwill is now only concerned with selling to the end user and have taken most of the profit out of the objects in their inventory.
I’m not faulting Goodwill for adjusting their business practices to better themselves as a company, they do provide some valuable services. Before these changes, though, there was an enormous number of people and small businesses that relied on the find and flip potential that Goodwill offered for their EBAY offerings. The ripple effect is significant.
They lost me when they forced you to start using paypal. I used Ebay maybe 500-600 times 5 - 15 years ago. Zero since.