Anymore most everything you look for, there will be several pages of items so overpriced nobody would buy them. These "Sellers" are paying for the ad, but will not make any sales. Can someone explain what they are gaining by doing that?

Listing items on eBay is free (up to several hundred items per month). Fees are collected only after an item has sold. Many sellers will put up listings with surprisingly high prices but leave them open to Best Offers. On these listings buyers can submit offers to the seller, and the seller can set the listing to automatically accept offers above a certain price and automatically decline offers below a certain price. Or the seller can individually review each offer and negotiate back and forth with the buyer.

Another reason for very high priced listings is to attract attention to a seller. If, say, you're searching for a meteorite for your office for whatever reason, you may choose to search eBay for meteorites and filter your results based on highest prices first. This way you aren't scrolling through hundreds of listings for pin-sized meteorites and instead will likely find the listings for larger and more expensive meteorites. A seller may list a meteorite for $500,000 so that it will show up at the top of the listings sorted based on highest prices first. In his listing he will encourage you to check out his other listings, visit his meteorite store, and tell you why his meteorites are better than other meteorites. It cost him nothing to list this and it successfully brought you to his page because you were interested to see what a $500,000 meteorite looked like and then you saw that it's just a standard meteorite but you did read the seller's self-promotion for his other meteorites.

If you're looking for cheaper, more run of the mill items and getting hundreds of results that seem overpriced this may be the scourge of Chinese listings. Unfortunately because these sellers pay no listing fees and the items are drop-shipped from China, there is nothing to stop them from listing thousands and thousands of overpriced items. Eventually someone will happen along and purchase an item or two, making it all worthwhile for them. I particularly despise these listings and agree it makes it harder to filter for what I am looking for. eBay is a highly imperfect auction site but it is also the only viable auction site. Their fees continue to go up (presently around 12.5%) and they recently did away with PayPal for sellers. I like eBay less and less but continue to use it frequently.

I never go on Ebay so I wouldn't know how they work, but I think that the same theory applies to the telemarketers that we all get numerous times daily. REALLY, does anyone know anyone who ever bought from these invasive, non-english speaking intruders on YOUR paid for phone line? I guess as the old saying goes, that even a blind hog will find an acorn sometime.