Sounds to me that they are suffering the same as any other company on or off the web - from the recession. It's hitting people where it hurts the most (in their pockets) and with ebays high fees, people cannot afford to use it as much as they would like. But we have seen big companies go to the wall over the past year or so. Granted no big internet companies, but only time will tell. It's just down to their money management. If they have been clever, they will have enough money to either come out with something new (as mentioned above, the ebay motors) or just ploughing in money until this 'blip' in their staff/finances settles down.
I started using ebay back in 2002. I haven't even logged into my ebay account in over 3 years though because their fee's are so horrible. I like amazon & craigslist way better than ebay.
I think it is great that Ebay will have some strong competition......they might quit trying to rob the little guy so much. I know Ebay has already been restructuring their fees and trying to lessen some of their overhead. I have gotten at least half a dozen emails from them in the past month trying to get me to open up my store there again. I quit using them some time ago.....after large fees for both them and their PayPal rag plus wanting you to give free shipping, using them just became a waste except for backlinks and branding. Might not be a bad thing to buy a few stocks in the other company as mentioned in one of those posts. I know many sellers are looking for a change and there might be some short term profits there.
I have to agree that the Ebay's days are numbered. I've been there since day ONE and a series of major missed opportunities / Epic fails with CEOs / pissing off their core users eg: small business and at-home-sellers / trying to compete with Amazon / terrible changes to the feedback system / etc. will eventually kill them. Example: Now everyone has to use PayPal? So my real cash at pickup is no good? The sad thing is, it'll take a LOT of $$$ for someone to even think of competing..tens of millions of dollars.