This increases the opportunity for the new smaller auction sites.
Ebay is just hurting themselves.
Not necessarily. I think it’s a effort to promote listings of offbeat items that have an iffy chance of selling at all. As a fairly frequent buyer of such items, I’d like to see more of them listed. E.g. I’ve bought a number of items related to a small midwestern town where my mother’s family has roots. To most prospective buyers, they’d look like worthless junk, and a seller has little way of knowing whether there may be an interested buyer or two hanging around looking for an item with an obscure feature. But the more such items are listed, the more occasional/casual searchers will find an interesting hit on their obscure interests, and the more occasional/casual searchers will become regular, systematic searchers and frequent buyers.
The timing of this is probably perfect for the economic cycle. More people will be finding themselves in financial difficulty, and with time on their hands due to unemployment or under-employment. Perfect time to scour the attic and basement and shed for items they don’t want, but which might bring in a few bucks if sold on eBay. But they’re less likely to list them if it involves a larger upfront fee with no guarantee of any return at all.
A related benefit to eBay from bringing in new buyers of obscure stuff is that many of these people are probably not in the habit of online shopping, or at least not on this type of site. Once they start hanging around eBay looking for obscure items, they’ll soon start to notice that you can get just about anything on eBay, and start shifting some shopping that they used to do in bricks-and-mortar stores, or the online sites of bricks-and-mortar store chains, to eBay. I definitely fit that category. I originally got into eBay when looking for items that were unlikely to be found anywhere else, but now buy new mainstream merchandise there fairly frequently.
I’ve already moved some stuff to WAGGLEPOP.COM
Can you post some of those? :)