Why doesn't eBay...

MansGame said:

...offer a snipe service? Not only are they leaving money on the table but it'd bring higher closing sales and it'd shut down outside sites which basically infiltrate their site on behalf of bidders.

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gmsieb said:

If they did this, they would end up charging us 3-4 times what we pay now, for the service.

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MansGame said:

...offer a snipe service? Not only are they leaving money on the table but it'd bring higher closing sales and it'd shut down outside sites which basically infiltrate their site on behalf of bidders.[/QUOTE}

Sniping lessens the final price usually. Ebay wants you to place bids over the length of the auction to drive up the ending price, making their sellers happy to realize a higher final price and ebay also benefits from higher fees collected on higher final prices.

...allow users to search historical prices which go back however far? Even if it was for a fee, they're leaving money on the table being the largest auction house and could be the price guide for nearly anything and everything.

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Making historical prices harder to find helps ebay collect higher final prices as you can't see beyond so many weeks what the item has been selling for in order for a buyer to find frequency of an item listed and its typical price. I consider that ebay makes historical prices harder to find because of the limitations of how far back it goes plus the fact the completed listings item is buried in the mobile app or you have to scroll down some in a PC browser to find the button to select it. I think ebay licenses completed items data beyond what they allow on the website so they do make money if they had a license with beckett, for example, to help the beckett price guide.

...create a separate section or even site for sports cards which has a different fee structure and shipping deals to make it more competitive to a COMCs on a larger scale where it's economical to sell cards for $1 or whatever and not get killed on fees, etc.?

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I don't see how this is possible considering ebay is a venue to match buyers/sellers and not
a warehouser of cards so you can ship cards from multiple sellers in one shipment to save postage.
on ebay, every card is going to have to come from a different seller so unless you get two sellers in the same area to meet up to mail their cards in one package, you aren't going to be able to save on postage.

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