Ebay is quickly becoming useless.

I have been an avid ebay fan, user and evangelist for more than 10 years (July 1999). In that time I have enjoyed not only frequently buying and selling, but have marveled at how ebay uniquely harnessed the distributed collaborative power of the Internet to match buyers and sellers--essentially creating new markets for very specific product.

But now the magic is going away fast.

Over the past several months I have noticed a dramatic increase in the number of duplicate auctions by the same seller. And now, since ebay has decided to include store items in search results the problem is even worse.

For example, suppose I am interested in buying a microscope--preferably a quality used one from a private party. (Try searching for "stereo microscope".)

I need to wade through hundreds of identical or similar auctions from the same handful of sellers.

I understand that "precision*world" sells AmScope microscopes--but really! Do you think I need to see hundreds of listings from the same seller for the same or similar products?

(The same is true for many if not most other items: try "mig welder" for another example.)

The clutter is really symptomatic of a move from ebay being a community for buying and selling toward being just another advertising venue. If I want redundant advertisements, I can listen to the radio, watch TV, or go look at banner ads.

On ebay, I don't want to be advertised to. I am not going to buy from a seller just because they have the most listings any more than I will hire "AAAA Plumbing Repair" because they are listed first in the phone book.

The good news is that the problem is easy to fix: simply give buyers an easy option to:

a) roll up auctions for the same item from the same buyer to a single search result
b) filter by "new" and "used" items, and
c) filter sellers with more than X active listings
d) distinguish between and sort by "personal" and "commercial" sellers

You could even go further and force multiple buy-it-now auctions from the same seller for the same item to be a single auction.

I understand that ebay wants to encourage merchants to pay listing fees--and the more fees the better. But clutter is killing the community and driving buyers away. In the long run, embracing excessive listing clutter will prove to be detrimental to ebay. Without buyers, everyone looses: sellers, ebay and even the buyers themselves.

With search results, "less is more" is definitely true. I'd rather see the 12 listings that I'm actually interested in purchasing than the 12,000 listings that are largely irrelevant to my interests.

Ebay, you have thrived because you have been a "community" of buyers and sellers. But you're alienating this community to drive short-term revenue. Once your community is gone, you will have only glorified pay-per-impression advertising for a dwindling number of eyeballs.

I want to be a buyer or a seller, not a viewer or an advertiser. Ebay, you must act now to facilitate commerce within your community so that it does not deteriorate further. You must cut the multiple listing clutter.