Auction volume shrinkage is down to policies
I've been selling on ebay for a few years, have a solid multi-thousand sales record and feedback at 100%. Ebay sales consttute a viable secondary income for me but even I have been reducing the quantity of my listings because of new seller-hostile listing policies. They recently started to dictate maximum p&p charges on some types of items. On the face of it, this is okay, but in practice it;s just not flexible enough and so many items I would have listed I now won't, because I can't charge realistic p&p on them and I'm not prepared to make a loss just to make ebay look good. Then there's the much publicised "positive feedback only for buyers" policy. I've hardly ever had to leave anything else, but now when a buyer clearly takes the piss, I can't warn other sellers about them. That rankles, so I've stopped shipping to many parts of the world to minimise the problems. That means less auction sales too. Increased FV fees are another problem. I sell a lot of items on commission for other people, and that means I have to reduce the percentage I pay them. They don't like that, so they don't give me so many items to sell. The list of problems goes on. Ebay is still a viable opportunity if you do it right, but it's not the route to sensible profits it was.