Surprised by the comments here, I've always found eBay positive, I buy mostly used items, usually 'Buy it now' rather than auctions, and usually from sellers wi

Surprised by the comments here, I've always found eBay positive, I buy mostly used items, usually 'Buy it now' rather than auctions, and usually from sellers with solid sales histories. I can't remember ever having a problem, and I can't really imagine buying from random classified ads in preference. It is disappointing though that they're focusing on new items, and not trying to find ways of improving the situation for buying or selling used items. For instance, perhaps you could have projects to figure out what most customers look for in images, and encourage sellers to provide good coverage, or to pick up images not properly focused on the product. Think of how many pictures eBay must have of any particular laptop model, and when buyers browse, what images they pause on, and where they zoom; it really must be an unparalleled dataset. There are a lot of listings, even for expensive items, where the pictures are just insufficient. And even with filtering and categorization, you could more intelligently encourage sellers to answer categorization questions that meet seller desires, that can be picked up through analysis of how people browse or search for listings. If you could say to a seller "not putting in RAM for a laptop cuts your audience by 18%", and gameify the process of improving the listing, I imagine you could make a lot of progress. Or perhaps using known dimensions of objects or their packaging to provide an simplified, streamlined marketplace for shipping options. Essentially, they probably feel that second hand sales are a niche market, so they can't continue explosive growth without moving into standard retail. It's the downside of the continual fast growth mindset. They could really cultivate their market, and grow the company by growing the market, by incrementally improving the buyer and seller experience for 2nd hand items. Shifting focus away from that has big risks, not just rewards.