My .Mac picture hosting server is giving this message today:

Nearly every auction which ends unsold garners an email from a user who claims to have missed the auction and wants to buy the item. Some will be genuine (but why people search completed items instead of live ones for things to buy is another question*). Most are patently fake and come from manipulative users who refrain from bidding and then hope to buy items cheaply and without competition.
EBay needs to track ended listing enquiries and compare them to a user's buying activities to determine whether a user is doing it as a  strategy or every once in a while does miss an interesting auction.

*I also think eBay should only display to third parties unsold completed  items with the price information hidden.

I like the new Home page, but I have another idea:-
EBay Home Page is the most visited Home Page on the Internet so eBay could get sponsors for it and earn huge sums. Most of the Home page window would be an ad for, say, a car maker, with a clickable link to that maker's cars on eBay. Along the top would be a simple toolbar for  eBay's logo, search, sign in, register, My eBay, site map. There would be a rolling queue of advertisers paying $x,000 a minute to reach eBay's huge global audience.You would need to visit the Home page to view eBay, so bookmarks would need to change. Something like the current new Home page would lurk behind the sponsored page.

Surfing glass and pottery sites on the Internet I have noticed how minimalist a lot of the descriptions are: title, photo(s) and a simple list of facts (colour, material, size, country of origin, etcetera; "attributes" and "values" in computerese) giving each item in an inventory a uniform presentation and not missing out anything a buyer is likely to want to know. I am trying this approach in my eBay sales but really don't know if buyers prefer this rather bald presentation to the more gossipy, confiding and prosy method so popular with eBay sellers: "You are bidding on a lovely estate purchase I don't know much about. The estate was a multi-million dollar Rhode Island property with thousands of valuable gorgeous old things: all the New York dealers were there  but they didn't seem to notice this dinky little treasure in a box under a table at the end of the sale..." cue picture of a wine glass earned with cereal coupons in 1975.

Combined shipping often makes sense but because postal tariffs change when weights pass thresholds it is often cheaper to send items in two or more packages.

Pricing result for a delivery to USA weighing 1100.0 gram with up to £50 compensation using
International Signed For is £17.22.                                                  £17.22 x 2 = £34.44 in total.

Pricing result for a delivery to USA weighing 2200.0 gram with up to £50 compensation using
International Datapost  is...                                                                                  from £56.00 up.