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Do you still remember when eBay was a great place to buy and sell things? Today most auctions close with 0 bids, a minority are purchased at all. Most items are sold by "power sellers" which is really code word for businesses. Heck, most sellers are probably businesses at this point. As eBay discovers it isn't recession proof and scrambles to become a primarily "buy it now" channel it needs to remember what eBay was.
eBay was the ultimate garage / tag / bizzare sale. For the first time ever people -- consumers had an easy way to sell things to other consumers that didn't involve putting up flyers and putting things out on your front lawn. eBay was the first global C2C marketplace. eBay's purchase of paypal was genius and a beautiful marriage (unlike all of eBay's other purchases... yeah we're talking about you skype). The combination of eBay and paypal was great because now consumers which didn't have the resources or need for a merchant account were able to conveniently charge other consumers credit cards. eBay provided the channel, tools and audience for consumers to become sellers and as a result grew exponentially.
