During my 5+ years of listing I have found that eBay uses the carrot and stick approach with its customers. Whenever it increases its commission (it went up to 10.9% in July) or widens its commission application (as it did when it began to charge a commission on postage(!!!) it also gives sellers a carrot (removing the fee for Buy It Now, giving the option of 3 free listings or increasing the number of free listings). In this case it compensated for the commission increase by offering 100 free listings. Apparently someone at eBay has changed his mind an hour or so after notifying us of this gift and removed the offer. Pity they couldn't be polite enough to tell us that the 100 free listings were only available for a few minutes.