Unless you’re part of the legion of eBay merchants, you may not have heard that the online auctioneer is making a series of changes to its business, including the baffling idea to eradicate negative seller ratings. The changes haven’t gone over so well as this YouTube video of an angry merchant disrupting a presentation at last week’s annual eBay seller conference demonstrates. Posted last week it has already 166 nasty comments that seem to capture the sellers’ frustration and the prospect that sellers could be ready to abandon eBay enmasse.

eBay shares have taken a bit of a beating in the past 10 weeks (down almost 20 per cent). Now, the revolt at the seller conference, captured by this fuzzy, barely audible YouTube video, is sending shares down further. As the Motley Fool wrote yesterday in a stock picking column titled "Throw This Stock Away":

… things aren’t exactly verbalicious in eBay’s world these days.
Meg Whitman, the charismatic CEO who guided the company through most of
its growth spurt, left in April. Power sellers are more restless than
usual, as if the wave of boycotts, lackluster growth, and unimpressive
turnout at last week’s eBay Live annual powwow weren’t putting enough weight on the namesake site’s shoulders.

You can expect this very public break-up to play out for weeks on every social media forum and in the mainstream press.

- Bernhard