Those sellers never left eBay. It just got harder to find them among the noise. I still frequently have that great "old eBay" experience today when buying from sub-100-feedback sellers.

I've found that if you restrict purchases to goods in "preowned" condition for a lot of things you basically get the same Ebay as before.

The tricky part is that there's a lot of people selling preowned goods as "new", usually they're items they purchased or received as a gift they never used. I think they're trying to emphasize the unused nature of the items, but nowadays they just get lost in the noise of direct-from-the-factory items.

Ahh I miss froogle. But I also really liked yahoo shopping. It had a similar global search, if I recall, but you could still buy directly from tons of stores.

Same with using pricewatch to get cheap computer parts.

It feels like a lot of the competition is gone now.