by Glenn Chapman
The California firm's latest moves focus on making buying items at eBay more like standard store purchases, complete with electronic payments and fixed prices.
EBay is altering anew its fee system, making it cheaper to post items but taking a bigger percentage of sales.
"These are some of the boldest changes we've ever made," eBay spokesman Usher Lieberman told AFP.
"It is a shift in the business model for our sellers and for eBay. We are asking sellers to rethink their listing strategies and giving them economic incentives to do that."
An online eBay chat forum teemed Thursday with complaints as sellers disparaged new rules including a ban taking effect in October on payments using checks or money orders.
"EBay used to be fun," wrote an eBay user with a screen name Starfish2rcn. "Now it's run like a dictatorship."
EBay will require transactions be done using credit cards, debit cards, or online services such as PayPal, which it owns.
Sellers complain that PayPal takes a percentage of each transaction, cutting into their profits.
"We are really recognizing e-commerce in general and what our buyers are seeing anywhere else online," eBay spokeswoman Nichola Sharpe told AFP.
"It is going to make the process faster and more reliable."
Electronic payments reportedly result in far fewer complaints when it comes to consumating deals.
EBay is cutting the price of "Buy It Now" postings to 35 cents each and more than tripling the time they spend online to 30 days.
Sales of such fixed-price items reportedly account for 43 percent of eBay deals and are growing at a rate of 60 percent annually.
"We think auctions really work for unique items, rare items, hard-to-find items or one-of-a-kind-in-demand items," Lieberman said. "Fixed price really works for multiple items."
Anyone selling batches of identical items will be able to load them in single postings instead of having to list them separately, as is current practice.
The change saves sellers money and will also hopefully stop people from dominating eBay pages featuring search results for shoppers, according to Lieberman.
Earlier this year eBay stopped letting sellers post feedback about buyers while still letting buyers critique sellers.
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