Jeff Chan:

"Unlike Amazon, eBay is not an innovative company. Amazon has constantly improved the shopping experience by introducing useful features like collaborative filtering, personalization, book browsing, and web services.

eBay, on the other hand, appears to be coasting on its monopoly position, and not too smoothly either. The reputation system is not robust. There is no scaling of ratings by dollar amount of transactions nor any use of network flow algorithms, or even a two-level system that Amazon uses to rate reviews. The numerous service outages, which directly impacts their bottom line, reflect poorly on their technical management.

The listings are an abject mess once you drill down below the top-level categories. It is true that items on eBay are hard to categorize, but some form of filtering can be useful. For example, when browsing servers, I want to be able to filter by the number and type of processors, memory size, number and type of drives etc."

Browsing on eBay is so useless (at least in the product categories I'm interested in) that the only way I use the site is through My eBay and search. And everyone marvels at their request to pay to be able to use their web service.