If this deal does eventually go through, then it might be a good time for someone to start working on a competitor to take over the online auction space.

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rtkwe 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The biggest headache has always been fraud, eBay gets if from both sides and it's a pretty intractable problem to solve as the middle man.

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xp84 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That's what those huge ~10% final value fees they charge are for. And other revenue such as sponsored listings (pay to boost your item in search results).

As long as they keep the fraud volume below like 5% of sales, I feel like it's just a numbers game, where they just need to get as much sales onto their platform as possible to give them enough operating margin to cover their costs (including fraud) and provide profit.

Admittely, I have no idea how well they're doing at that, I haven't looked at their financial statements or anything.

	▲	rtkwe 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah my main point was it's a complete pain in the ass to deal with if you want to do it properly in a way that actually prevents fraud on either side. eBay has kind of just erred one side or the other for most of it's existence and right now the complaints are mostly from the seller side that I see.