In a recent post, I said that eBay has jumped the shark. Threadwatch has been discussing the eBay / Yahoo! rumors and a couple of the comments are so valuable to eBayers that it’s worth revisiting the issue and highlighting it here. John Andrews is shopping on eBay for a research project and he points out that the retail world has overtaken eBay with fine-print value options to monetize buyer ignorance. This takeover isn’t even something that bothers eBay, in fact the system seems to encourage it.

More importantly to our community, as we have people coming into our forum all the time finding shill bidders, eBay has “solved” that problem by introducing a feature to allow anonymous bids for items over a few hundred bucks. So now “you can’t make claims of shill bidding with any certainty.”

Aaron Wall agrees and offers a new slogan for them: “eBay is the bonus ringtone offer site of everything retail.”

One final point. Google and Yahoo! are completely useless for searching for anything negative about eBay. Every single search shows almost a complete page of eBay subdomain spam. That might help keep them alive a little bit longer, but if your users aren’t happy, even if you can’t “find it on Google“, they will stop using it.