Preface: I will disclose that I worked on a consulting team at eBay and did not find the experience to be fun.
So sure, not everyone is capable of building their own store. And not everyone can find the stuff that is rare, weird, broken and arcane anywhere else, virtually. But with the fact that online merchants (especially Amazon) live off of the long tail, there is less and less room for eBay to exist.
It used to be the fact that eBay was leading on price, but I am hard pressed to find anything that is cheaper on eBay. Search for the really odd item on Google and you will most likely find it somewhere else, cheaper. Furthermore, anyone can list an item on Amazon, and Amazon has something like 80% of the items on eBay (ok, no cars) with drastically better search, orders of magnitude better layout and no-scam shipping costs.
eBay sellers have this really mind-numbing game of who can list an item cheapest and charge the most on shipping. Sell a pin and charge for the shipping of a car. Did we mention the fact that you will very often bid on these so-called auctions against the seller. It is a really fun game where you post a price, then get outbid, repeat. Often you will get an email telling you that there are more items in future auctions. Now the seller knows your price range.
eBay may be fun for the many people who built a reputation among the users. Good for them. It is also difficult to get the eyeballs to your store when there are still many of them looking at eBay. But as a buyer, it is just so passe. So 1990s. Meg Whitman announced she will retire. Maybe she arrived at the same conclusion.
