As I've said before, I'm a current eBay Powerseller (although I have just had my bye-bye email), and I care about the site and selling on it. If you pop over to the forums, you'll see a lot of disgruntled sellers. This isn't unusual, but added to the usual hot air, a large number of sellers are actually closing their listings and leaving for pastures new. What is also much more worrying from eBay's point of view is that a lot of the sellers that are leaving are shooting stars - members with more than 10,000 positive feedback. These sellers represent the most trusted members - if they're leaving then there is something seriously wrong with the site.

Recently, eBay has announced link-ups with some large partners, notably Chrysler and buy.com. This has led some to speculate that they are trying to re-position themselves as an online shopping mall, with smaller retailers tolerated but not actively encouraged. Whether this strategy is correct, and whether it works or not, will determine the fate of the current management. More important to the company though is the future direction of Paypal.

eBay acquired Paypal for $1.5bn in December 2002, an amount that now appears to be a bargain when compared to the valuations given to sites such as Facebook and Youtube. In recent years, Paypal has agressively pushed its merchant services for off-eBay transactions. Paypal, thus far, has not been tarred with the scammer/conman brush that seems to bilght eBay, and with the loss of trust in Western Union and other similar services, it appears that the time is right for an an even more agressive push by Paypal in to this sector.

So we're left with the possibility that eBay may be devoured by its own acquisition - by tidying up the auction site, eBay decreases the possibility of lawsuits similar to the recent Hermes conterfeit case. This leaves a lower profile eBay - one that won't cause embarrassment for Paypal as it tries to realign its self as a payment gateway. Again, whether this scenario is correct remains to be seen. As the current changes propagate through to the end user, we'll get a clearer idea of where the company is heading. My guess would be that the eBay of 2018 will be a much smaller edifice than what we see today.