Buying and selling on eBay used to be so easy and so much fun.
It used to be that the online auction site's biggest strength was the idea that anyone could sell anything there. A box of sports pages from the 1950s, discovered in my father's basement after he died, generated all sorts of interest; two lots of four pages sold for $10 each, and the buyers were plenty happy to get them. A relative once bought a plastic container filled with candy jawbreakers, ate them, then put the empty container on eBay. It sold for more than enough to cover the cost of the candy in the first place.
For those finally cleaning out that desk drawer or wading through that pile of stuff in the attic, eBay was a godsend: not only could you get rid of stuff, but you could get money for just about anything and find it a good home. Plus, thanks to the Web site's feedback system, there was even a way to let the world know when someone stiffed you.
Sadly, those days seem behind us now.
EBay has morphed into this rather unwieldy behemoth, awash in complicated (and high) listing fees and fixed-price listings that often seem less than a bargain. From the sellers' standpoint, lots of stuff goes unwanted, without any nibbles from the buying public. Buyers are apt to find the really good stuff either priced out of their reach or migrated to other Web sites. Sellers aren't even allowed to leave negative feedback anymore.
Even as a corporate entity, eBay seems to have hit something of a wall. On the day this month that eBay announced it would pay $945 million for the Timonium-based Internet billing service Bill Me Later, it also announced it would lay off 10 percent of its 16,000-member work force. Even the company's stock price, which rose to $54 a share shortly after going public in September 1998 and seemed the surest of sure bets, has taken a beating. Yesterday afternoon, the price closed at $15.47 a share, well below the $32 it was getting as recently as April.
Of course, not all the news out of eBay's San Jose, Calif., headquarters is bad; the company, for instance, announced last week that its third-quarter revenue was up 12 percent over the same period last year, to $2.12 billion (even while it adjusted its annual revenue projections down about $300 million). There are still plenty of people making plenty of money selling stuff, especially when they view business on the site as more of a job than a hobby. Put the necessary time in and learn how to market your stuff, they say, and eBay is still the best game in town.
