This is old news.<p>A while back I was running out of space so I was selling old books and other things and thought auctions on Ebay would be a good way to get rid of the stuff since the stuff would be gone in 7 days.<p>Unfortunately it wasn&#x27;t.  Many of the auctions had no bidders,  so this was not a working discovery mechanism.<p>One issue with eBay,  the Amazon Marketplace and many other online marketplaces is that you don&#x27;t get to see the bid and ask spread.  That is,  you might see somebody selling a book for $135 but you have no idea if anybody will buy the book at $135 or even $35 for the matter. This uncertainty creates conflict for anyone who wants to participate in the marketplace.<p>I did some searching on the web and found a market maker,  who had me type in the numbers for my books,  movies and video games and gave me a quote.  I put the stuff in a box,  and they paid me by e-check.<p>Another ebay killer is the emergency of Etsy.  It used to be that you could find quirky things on Ebay that you could not get in stores,  but now so many stores list inventory on Ebay and the quirky stuff is on Etsy.