According to my mother who's been on Ebay for 11 yrs, the complaints are very legit.
She says that China has ruined Ebay. Cheap Chinese crap has flooded Ebay. The Chinese items are replicas of the items that are listed by the long time American sellers, but are at much lower quality and lower price. It's pretty much the WAL MART scenario.
Another complaint from my mother: there are separate sites that allow sellers to list items and manage their auctions. My mother and a lot of the old school Ebayers used a site called Vendio.
Vendio was bought out by a Chinese company and the customer service is now through an Indian call center. As you can expect, this is a huge pain in the ass and my mother eventually canceled.
My mom could talk to me all day about all the policy changes that Ebay has made that has totally screwed up everything. In a nutshell: cheap Chinese sh*t and horrible business decisions by Ebay to squeeze literally every cent from buyer and seller are ruining a uniquely American business.
Excellent, You are so correct, I did a lot of camera business there at one time. Just Plain Old Fashion GREED has taken over operations at eBay and I no longer do business there. It simply wasn’t worth the grief trying to fight my way through the no good ,liars thieves and cheats that have made a home there.
Your mom is absolutely right. My daughter has been selling for about 12 years. I have seen all the awful changes. Used to when you were looking for a particular brand, you would get a list of only that brand, such as Home Interior, now if you search for Home Interior, you will get anything with those words in it. You have to look through pages and pages of Chinese junk to find what you are looking for. Unscrupulous sellers have learned how to work the system. Also they will put .01 cents on all their auctions, then charge 10 times the cost to ship it to avoid listing fees. I absolutely hate Ebay now.
Your mother is right. eBay is killing their own goose. It stated to fail before the economy tanked so I know it wasn’t that. They just literally piss on their sellers now.