The entire text of the article has been copied and pasted into this message thread on eBay's message boards. By going to the message thread, the article can be read without having to register on the Wall Street Journal site.
It is clear that eBay wishes to court the sellers who have warehouses full of items. According to the article, eBay "plans to focus its online-marketplace business on used and overstocked goods, rather than on the retail market for new goods that is dominated by competitors such as Amazon.com Inc."
The key word is "overstocked." It seems that since the plan to become Amazon 2.0 has not worked so well, Donohoe now thinks eBay should also attempt to become Overstock.com 2.0. Most of Thursday's comments have centered around that idea. EBay plans to continue its destructive trend of imitating other retailers but will now attempt to imitate Overstock in addition to Amazon.
The comments that have been made about this article are very interesting. Here is one from mydogsownme in the eBay message thread:
My personal take is that they are realizing that they made a mistake, but not fully wanting to turn back. To save face, they will continue manipulating this site to find a way to keep unpopular and nonworking policies in place. Not once in that article did I see any admission that Donohoe made any mistakes. eBay will remain without any significant growth until they realize that what made them unique and successful were the sellers placing their used items up for sale. This site was built on the customer finding a unique, hard-to-find or desirable item, at a great price using the auction format.The auctions always were what was great about eBay, and the auctions are about all that is still good about eBay.
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