Ebay is an online auction site where everyone can sign up to bid/buy or list/sell for free. Ebay provides you with an environment and tools for doing buying and selling, and you can be sure that you will be able to find almost anything there.
It is hard not to appreciate Ebay for what they have done --- they have literally changed the way people get rid of stuff they don't need, and have given a wonderful opporttunity for volume sellers (and there is plenty of them on Ebay) to make their living. They have even produced the jobs on a secondary market creating precedents of companies whose whole goal was to get hired to unclutter people's sheds, backyard, garages by using the online auction site. Makes sense to me, after all it could be an efficient way of doing "estate sales". There is another type of Ebay-ers who are using arbitrage, i.e. buy low, sell high, which as some recent research shows is entirely possible. An extreme example of such arbitrage is when an unsophisticated seller misspells the item's title and doesn't recognize it until the item is gone. Unless you mark "search in description" Ebay will only look for keywords in item's title, thus misspelling may create an excellent "buy low -- sell high" opportunity.
Ebay makes its living from charging the insertion or listing fees (seller is charged), charging the seller the comission on the sale price of the item and finally they own Paypal, the most popular Ebay payment system, that charges the seller for each transaction that goes through them. Thus, the buying process is virtually free for the buyer, which is great. Which brings me to the next question:
