I agree, Ebay has changed for the worse. Too many full-timers and pros who keep the prices up. Everyone seems to list things using "buy it now" and then have the auction side with a minimum starting bid very close to the "buy it now". So basically it just becomes like a retail listing.

The only way to score a deal on buy it now is to look at the items that are "newly listed" and hope the seller made a mistake in pricing something too low. If you don't catch a deal during the first 12 hours or so after it's listed, rest assured the chance will be gone because one of the "pros" will have already noticed it. And even though they might not need the item, they will buy it low and then re-list it close to retail. A "stock market lite", using merchandise instead of shares. Maybe more like a real estate market when you think about it. If you do enough volume the margins don't need to be too high...

Plus, ebay lost some luster to Craigslist.