FWIW I don't hear of nearly any of the horror stories I used to. From my recollection, 2011 was about the peak of it, where buyers were claiming to never get their stuff, getting liberal refunds at the expense of the sellers. Sellers were getting their accounts locked by Paypal, sometimes with tens-of-thousands of dollars at stake, only to get it back 6 months later if they begged and screamed.

I opened a seller account in about 2020 to unload some server gear and almost got scammed, but I googled the buyers name and saw he was accused of fraud by several other people. I re-routed the package and although I didn't get reimbursed for that fee, ebay made me right and paypal (I think) gave me a small credit. They even had a phone call with me which seemed like they actually investigated it (I dont remember many details, it was 1 transaction 5 years ago).

There's just no way that any online auction can control fraud. I was on ebay yesterday as a buyer, looking for a tape backup drive. The seller clearly had been burned and (bitterly) warned that the sale was final, because previously he had sold a working drive which was parted out, replaced with broken parts (heads) and returned as defective. there's no way a third party can protect against it because either way the fraudster wins. 1) sell a bad drive, claim it was good, but accuse the buyer of fraud. Or 2) buy a good drive, swap it out with bad parts and return it. how could anyone (like ebay) solve this problem?

That's the point. They want to drive off amateurs who are trying to liquidate dads old tools in favor of the guys who are doing that stuff in professional volumes and the professional dealers and importers who are buying lots of stuff and breaking them up for retail sale and "real businesses" who run an eBay store alongside their other ecommerce stuff. They were pretty transparent about their motives IIRC.

imo it's slightly more pro-buyer than it was a couple of years ago. If only because unreasonable buyers have killed off most of the value of having 100% positive feedback.

Remember losing it a few years ago when an obvious scammer tried to bully me into a partial refund for an item he had already resold at a 50% markup.

Yes I have a 25+ year old account with 100% feedback, but I don't think it matters nearly as much anymore. Also clearly some subset of buyers understands they can abuse high feedback sellers who want to maintain their feedback rating.

In a way I like the more conversational forum buy & sell system where I have feedback, but also each purchase starts with a DM. I usually can suss out from a few DMs if a buyer is going to be a tire kicker wasting my time, or a perfectionist who will be a pain to sell to. In either case I let those buyers pass and wait for someone worth doing business with.

On eBay you have no choice in who your buyer is.

I set basically everything at an inflated price and accept offers. The kind of person who's going to be a pain will basically never pay an inflated price and if they do you can partial refund the amount you actually would've accepted to let them think they've won.