Quite the opposite, I would say. A broken business model would be caring about hundreds of thousands of 99p auctions that cost the company the same to service as the £99 auctions do, but which make the company much, much less money. And which anger the business sellers who bring in a LOT of money, because they're sick of trying to get visibility for their items amongst broken teapots, torn comic books, and "rare" items that are about as rare as hairballs appearing in a house containing 15 cats. (That isn't my opinion regarding visibility...but you only need to look around to see that it's the consensus.)
No matter how much the item sells for, it costs the same for eBay to process it. Server costs, transaction processing, even the amount of emails they have to send...it's all the same. Auctions cost more than BINs from a technical standpoint, too. For a number of reasons, the chances of a customer service agent having to be involved is almost guaranteed to be far more likely for a lower-priced transaction than for a higher-priced one, as well.
So they absolutely do NOT care that Maud in Aberystwyth can't sell her "vintage" toilet roll holder at auction for 99p.
eBay doesn't care about low-priced auctions. If sellers had any sense, they wouldn't care about them either. I guarantee that fixed-price is more effective, EVEN if you don't know what an item is worth. People don't want to wait 7 days to see if they've won an item. Sellers don't want to wait for 4 days after that for the buyer to maybe, perhaps, possibly actually pay them for the item they won. Plus, the days of "maybe there will be a bidding war and I'll make THOUSANDS for this old teaspoon" are long, loooooooooooong behind us. You've got more chance of making £10 from an item by pricing it at £10, then you do of pricing it at 99p and hoping that people fight the price up to £10. If it doesn't sell, delist it and relist it for £9. Then £8. If you get to a fiver, keep relisting it at that. It doesn't cost you anything, and you get more visibility than it being an auction, because it keeps showing up in the "latest items" view. If it never sells for a fiver, then the chances that it would ever sell at 99p are remote at best.
I don't use auctions as a rule, but I put a game console bundle up a couple of weeks ago for an £80 start. 7 days. By the start of the 7th day, I had no bids, 23 watchers, and had six or seven questions about it to deal with. So I ended it and put it up for a BIN of £149.99. Sold within 24 hours. If I had left it running at auction, would it have gone for £150? Absolutely and assuredly not.
Auctions, apart from for higher-priced (say, £50 up) or very desirable items, are all but done. For all types of seller. And I bet eBay are over the moon about it.
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