That's a tough thing to do, compete with eBay. People will be turned off by the fact that there is nothing to buy and no one buying so you've got the difficulty of getting early users. I see you're trying to offer things for free now to get users, still tough. People won't care about you offering free things if no one is buying on your site.
Good luck getting that off the ground. It is nearly impossible to compete with a big business like eBay, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.
I would say you are better off working with the eBay API and doing something interesting with it. Maybe you could have some kind of "promote your ebay listing" option for members and then maybe you can get a few users to use your site. Still, it's an uphill battle and you're bringing like a butter knife.
Sorry to sound harsh, I just don't see how you're going to compete.
To be honest the mistake that many people make is in assuming that all they have to do is mimic a popular site such as ebay, make their fees cheaper and the cash will come rolling in.
The reality is that people use ebay as it is a very well established site with a huge audience.
Sure the fees might be expensive compared to their rivals and there are many "I hate ebay" sites, but the truth is that ebay is still the number one.
They have millions of vistors to their site.
Ask 100 people to name an auction site and 99 of them will say ebay.
Cheers,
Rob
