I'm certainly not going to try to correct any of the facts you give about ebid, I'm happy to accept that the details you give are all correct. But to me as a seller it's not the size of the company that helps me get sales, how long it's been going, or how it's structured that counts. It's the number of sales, how much they cost me in time, effort and of course how much it charges for their services that counts.
You answer your own question "So with ebid going for 26 years and still little known, the question is why?"
The answer is that the site doesn't advertise itself and relies on its sellers to promote their own ads. if they want to. I never have and where my buyers come from is still something of a mystery to me.
Like many others I wasted my first few years there. I listed a few items, mainly those that didn't sell on ebay back when my sales here were good and amounting to at least several a month, at intervals and hoped for the best. Predictably I sold virtually nothing.
At some point, getting despondent at the lack of sales, I took some time to think about the "Good bits" of the site and how I might use them to sell more. At the time I was caring for an elderly relative with Dementia and the time I had to spend working on either site was very limited. But I made a determined effort to list one new item on each site every Sunday morning.
This did increase sales slightly, ebay still easily outsold ebid but at least I was getting a few sales there every year, which I looked on as an bonus in addition to those on ebay.
From business sellers on ebay I learned some of the basics of SEO and applied them to all my listings and this was, I think, the breakthrough. I also applied what I learnt with google in mind. Ebay was beginning to move away from a Key-Word search in favour of its own rather unique search engine.
It stream-lined, stopped searching 'less fruitful categories', targeting the results according to the buyer's profile etc.. Which it has continued to this day with sponsored listings, IS and biasing the search towards quicker selling and preferably new items and listings. My ads. on ebay didn't fit well as my niche items tend to be slow selling, one-off items.
Ebid has never done this and as my sales here declined, my sales over there increased. (I know this because I always leave FB for my buyers there to keep an accurate count.) Not because ebid was getting any better but simply because buyers couldn't easily find my stuff on ebay any more and started searching further afield, especially during the Covid lockdowns. They have never gone back to their pre-Covid levels.
As someone on these boards once said "The only way to get a site that is perfect for you, is to build it yourself" and I agree. All sites have 'good' bits and 'not so good' bits. It's up to each seller to find out what works for them and where, but mostly how to use them to their advantage. I don't think there is too much wrong with ebid, it now works for me. The mistake that many who try it make (IMO) is that they think of it as a miniature ebay and try to use it in the same way as they use ebay. It isn't and probably never will be.
