Ebay's plan for the last few years has been to be a portal for huge Chinese manufacturers. They really show no regard for smaller sellers or sellers of unique vintage items I don't think, so why haven't Gemm, Musicstack or Abe Books been able to totally lockup that market and take it away from ebay? I've bought on Gemm for ages, and sometimes will buy from Musicstack, but while they have stock photos mo0re than before I wish they would have specific photos of vintage items which ebay started hosting around 2002. I may actually be to blame on that as I pointed out to more than one ebay employee back then how Amazon auctions at the time hosted sellers photos for free while you had to have webspace or pay a hoster to do the same on ebay at the time.
Ebay needs to die, I agree. The people in charge there now are insane as far as I'm concerned. Like facebook though they somehow get the herds passing through where Yahoo or blogspot and others have proven unable to. I used to get ten times the bidding on an ebay auction as on an amazon one back around 1999-2001, and with yahoo you were lucky to get one which is why it folded. Amazon decided to have a marketplace with no auctions at some point and ebay seemed to think they should imitate that, first by buying half.com and then integrating it into ebay, but it was a huge mistake I think. Now you have to weed through all this Chinese crap mis-listed consistently.
By the way, don't post the word Amazon on ebay's little forums area, it's against the (many sporadically enforced) rules and you can be banned ultimately for it. They have people threatening violence on many parts of it, even against ebay staff publishing the office address, but you have to call Amazon 'the river'.
