Many of the smaller sellers have been squeezed out by eBay policy and site changes, resulting in lack of confidence in the site and, sadly, in buyers as well.
I have always believed that a site like eBay is most successful when it functions like an ecosystem, containing a wide variety of sellers / buyers who all contribute to the overall sustainability (for example, a large seller can attract buyers who then go on to discover things from sellers of all types, a smaller seller can attract a different set of buyers looking for unique and hard to find items, and those buyers can sometimes become sellers [casual or otherwise] and introduce new things to the site. Many sellers are also buyers, but they can usually only spend if they sell, while the big retailers don't spend on the site so the flow of money, so to speak, gets more and more one way - out. Favouring big retailers in an environment like this can ultimately have the same effect of an ecosystem in which the apex predator eats all their food and then leaves the area a wasteland. The big retailers will move on, eBay won't be able to, so I question their priorities.
Many buyers are tired of the site and app glitches that seem to thwart what should be a simple process of buying and paying, tired of endless eBay spam which includes emails with subject lines like "what are you waiting for" (seriously, eBay?) not to mention spam about items that were looked at, but never even 'watched' or added to the cart (really seriously eBay? People have indicated a complete lack of interest in a listing, and you decide to spam them about it as if that's going to encourage purchase?)
A lot of their policies look like they're designed to inspire buyer confidence, but they're lazy, stop-gap solutions that address major issues after the fact, as far as I'm concerned. As a buyer, I can get my money back easily enough (most of the time) if I received something that isn't as described - that's neat and all, but how about addressing some of the site issues that would reduce the instances of may of the problems that actually occur.
That goes for sellers, too - I think properly enforcing site policies (including the ones for buyers), doing something about location misrepresentation, fraudulent listings, frequent scammers etc. would result in people being significantly more confident in buying and selling. i.e. If they knew the instances of issues were minimal, rather than if they knew something can be done about it after it occurs. As it is now, it's like eBay's just letting (some) people do whatever they want, and saying "we might fix it up after". Not good enough, by a long shot.
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