eBay is interesting. It has consistently high profit margins, but no upward movement in revenue or profit, which peaked over a decade ago, and its returns heavily lag SP500.
I’m guessing investors don’t see much opportunity for growth in the online auction business to make it worth dumping a bunch of money just to take market share from eBay.
eBay I think had their growth capped once you had Etsy, Amazon FBA, and other options on the field.
Your average normie has no interest in the hassle of selling their used stuff (which has, if anything, got harder in my 25ish years using eBay), nor of buying random used staff from anonymous individual sellers.
Etsy covers the arts & crafts coded goods (though much is now China dropship).
Amazon allows the big merchants to sell to normies who just want to click "buy" without thinking about seller rating risk, when something will arrive, etc. Basically most people have no idea they are buying from not-Amazon, because it says amazon.com and that's good enough. eBay never had the smarts to create that user experience.
Because you're a used <pick niche> dealer or a dealer of something that is on the large end of what you can send in "normal" mail. Tires come to mind, even on Amazon very few of them are actually FBA.
From my perspective, eBay has a solid niche of older items, and they tried to break into the buy new items market too, but the hassles of selling mean for the most part only scalpers sell new items on eBay. Although there's some niches where it's not unusual: new auto parts seem common, I guess it's easier for a dealer parts counter to run an eBay store than otherwise.
I find that for a lot of "cheap junk from China" gets cheaper when you eBay it directly from China and cut out the cost of the Amazon middle man.
Recently I bought a chainsaw tool on eBay from China as I didn't want to buy a 6-pack for $10. I was able to buy a couple for about $0.20 more per unit. Sure, higher unit price and they'll be here slower but it's several $6ish saved.
I mostly use eBay for buying computer and bike parts - e.g. my most recent purchase on my work (tax-exempt) account was a batch of a specific model of 40Gbit NIC, and a specific type of bike seat post on my personal account.
The eBay search function isn't great, but it's vastly better than Amazon, where search results are polluted by large numbers of garbage sponsored results - this may be related to its success in these niches. (although in my case it's partly because I can avoid paying for Amazon Prime, and still choose things based on prices that include shipping)
Do they even do it nowadays? I was under impression it turned into an ordinary marketplace, probably with a bit more focus towards small/private sellers.
I’m guessing investors don’t see much opportunity for growth in the online auction business to make it worth dumping a bunch of money just to take market share from eBay.