Has Ebay gained respectability or lost its way?

There was a time, not so very long ago, that Ebay was seen as the territory of amateur or slightly dubious businesses

Many wholesalers would not allow their goods to be supplied to Ebay sellers ostensibly to protect their brand but mostly due to a snobbish attitude to Ebay 

As a soft toy and teddy wholesaler we have accepted Ebay sellers for many years. Many people started their businesses on Ebay before progressing on to add websites and/or retail outlets and we have some great ebay sellers.

Our only provision is that retail prices were set at an acceptable level. We had previously found that some new sellers mistook the gross profit for income without taking in to account Paypal and Ebay fees and they then set retails at a very low level

Today Debenhams has become the first department store to have an offical online presence on both Amazon and Ebay. Their Ebay store is professional and clearly branded. It is being used as a clearance store but definitely not in a "pile it high, sell it cheap" way

Many stores have outlets on designer outlet villages to sell discontinued or over stocked items but I would guess that Ebay has significantly more traffic than even the busiest outlet village

So does this mean that Ebay is now respectible? Or does it mean that it has sold out to the big high street stores to the detriment of its loyal shops. We have watched as the calibre of Ebay sellers has increased significantly and we will be interested to see now whether the introduction of Debenhams (and presumably many more high street stores) will be benefical to them or not

Will it increase the footfall to the website as it becomes more main stream or will it squeeze out the very shops who made it successful in the first place?

What do you think?