EBay Insighter Oracles Future

Associated content's eBay insight writer is Randy Smythe a former Power Seller for the online auction innovator. His article The Real future of EBay; After Their Recent Agreement With Yahoo and Google continues with the story as a part of a series he has written for Associated Content. Randy Smythe's article is at:
The real Future Of EBay

I first came across eBay when somebody had given me a bundle of new racing-car-team crew t-shirts. They were Beefy-T's ,white  extra-large, with a tire company's graphics on them. These are high-quality shirts that sell for $20-25 at the department stores.

This gave me a reason to check-out what was happening on eBay, perhaps I could sell them online. When I got to the site I typed-in men's t-shirts in the search box, and after looking at a few pages came-up with one similar shirt, the price? $5.00.
Wow, I thought the prices were really low! Too low.

If I took the time to get online with eBay trying to sell these shirts online, after considering the time involved and eBay fees and packing costs I was better-off keeping the shirts and wearing them!

Randy Smythe is our insight guy a on the subject of eBay and he says that the auction company is "morphing into a shopping portal site rather than a destination." I take this to mean that eBay is transforming itself into just another online store selling new merchandise.

Where in the past small business people like Randy could start-up their business on their kitchen table and then as the volume grew, move the operation out to the garage; will this be possible in the future as eBay starts competing with it's own members?

If eBay limits the use of it's pages to transactions that result in fees for itself and restricts useage for attracting new customers what's in it for the eBay sellers? Do they have a future with the company? Should they start looking elsewhere for places to operate their businesses online? Reading Randy's article raises all sorts of questions.