If you send the seller a question about an item, find another of their listings, and send the question from that item page, rather than from the one that you actually want. This will add a little bit of work for the seller, if they want to add the question/answer to the item description page that you are actually interested in.

If you see an item that you want listed in auction format, send the seller a message asking if they will accept $x to end the auction early and sell the item to you. May be telling them that they would not have to wait as long to get their money (they would probably know that, but it still might help). If that does not work, use a sniping service such as Bidball.com to bid for you. It’ll bid in the last few seconds, helping you to save money and avoid shill bidding.

Use a site like Ebuyersedge.com to set up saved searches. You’d get an e-mail whenever a match is listed. Especially good for “Buy It Now”s priced right.

If the item that you are looking for is difficult to spell, try a misspelling search site like Typojoe.com to hopefully find some deals with items that have main keywords misspelled in the title. Other interested buyers might never see them. Then, if the item is listed an auction format, after a few days of no bids (hopefully anyway) send the seller and offer to end the auction early and sell the item to you. They may worry that no one is interested, and take whatever they can get.

http://www.businessinsider.com/ebays-transformation-when-do-we-start-calling-ebay-a-payments-company-2012-1

A picture is worth a thousand words, so they say. This linked “Business Insider” article contains a graph of eBay revenues since 2003. It shows quite starkly how eBay’s Marketplace revenue has stagnated since 2008, about the time that the headless turkey from Bain & Co, John Donahoe, got hold of the tiller and started his “destructive renovations”, and eBay’s share price has moved little in the same period; ergo the eBay Marketplace has effectively been in decline since 2008.

It should be obvious, even to the simplest of analysts, that as time passes, the Amazon River flows ever more strongly, whereas the eBay Creek now consists of only a line of stagnant ponds covered in slimy green algae—and isn’t that a couple of rusting Chinese-made shopping trolleys that I can see dumped therein?

The graph also shows the eBay-underpinning increases in revenue eBay has received from PreyPal during the same period, that is, from roughly when the “eBafia Don” effectively mandated PreyPal’s use on the eBay Marketplace. Some analysts think then that eBay’s future lays in PreyPal.

Well, if anyone thinks that the retail banks are going to let such a clunky, parasitic, flea-sized, upstart, middleman, “merchant of sorts” such as PreyPal—who after all does no more than ride precariously on the back of those banks’ own payments processing systems—continue to nibble away at one of the banks’ principal areas of business for any length of time, all I can say is, dream on …

PreyPal is little more than a clumsy, fraud-enabling middleman that nullifies the statutory protections that usually apply to the use of the likes of Visa/MasterCard.

Then there is PreyPal’s current testing of “mobile payments” at POS in Home Depot stores. What most worries me is, are people actually leaving their funds “on deposit” with this clunky, unlicensed, prudentially unregulated, PayPal “non-bank” that is itself not even licensed to provide credit? Otherwise, how are the funds for such mobile payments being sourced in any dynamically guaranteed way from the payer’s real bank? Hopefully, Not with the normal non-guarantee of payment that PreyPal serves up to its online merchants, I hope.

And, unfortunately for eBay’s chief headless turkey, Visa’s professional online offering “V.me”, when it is up and running later this year, should put paid to whatever success that the clunky PreyPal has had with online merchants outside of its mandated use on the eBay Marketplace—and soon thereafter both these unscrupulous and clunky entities should commence their long-deserved journeys down the gurgler.

Scott Thompson saw the writing on the wall; John Donahoe remains delusional, that fact confirmed by the many reported sightings of him waving his mobile phone about and mumbling about UFO sightings over San Jose.

Scott Thompson abandons the struggling eBay for the struggling Yahoo
http://forums.auctionbytes.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=166803#post166803

“How secure is PayPal for sellers?”—UK “Guardian”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2012/jan/27/is-paypal-safe-protection?commentpage=last#end-of-comments

And an interesting follow up to this UK “Guardian” article at:
http://www.hadess.net/2012/01/getting-conned-ebaypaypal-fun.html

PayPal claims PayPal not a debit card or payment network!
http://forums.auctionbytes.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=24148

eBay / PayPal / Donahoe: Dead Men Walking