Comment by hakfoo

I find eBay's optimizations have made it somewhat toxic.

Once you get to a product page, any further navigation of the form "similar/related products" is sponsored listings only these days.

They've narrowed a catalog that might have 1,000 relevant products into a pinball bouncing you between the same 12 sponsored listings. It's easy to figure "this is all they've got" and move on.

The model probably works okay for rebadged Alibaba tat with no meaningful differentiation; the 200 sellers with the same widget can be forced to bid against each other for visibility.

But for the classic line of "eBay as the world's garage sale", the last thing you want is to deliberately narrow your visible inventory. Customers are here for variety and the obscure, and restricting the market to "that which we can get placement revenue from" eventually drains them away.