Not so odd. I keep seperate ebay ids for bidding and for selling. My buying id has no sales on it. I don't think this is an uncommon practice-- if an unscrupulous seller leaves me a negative feedback, it will not affect my selling.

On the bidding end, I use a sniping service. This neatly sidesteps the shill bidders-- they can't shill up a bid that comes in during the last few seconds of an auction. It also kills off the increment bidders, who want the item and just punch in bids until they eclipse the high bid.

Ebay's changed a bit, and has moved more towards a fixed price buy it now strategy. This works fine, but for different reasons than the old bidding strategy. The vintage stuff seems less frequent now, ten years back there always seemed to be a Motobecane Grand Record or two up for bid, now they show up infrequently. There are still good buys out there, but you have to be fairly sharp to pick up on them.

I do miss being able to search a bidder's history. There was one guy who would put in lowball bids on nearly everything in my size, for example. Much as I hate to admit it, I would sometimes use him as a search engine...