eBay Inc. has just finished acquiring Shopping.com Ltd..

You can read about this at two separate (identical?) articles on bizjournals.com -

San Francisco Business Times
Silcon Valley / San Jose Business Journal

Obviously this merger will have an effect on each company and their stock prices, but I'm more interested in what effect it will have on clients & merchants of each individual company. Will it mainly be an overall gain or problem?

What a disappointment.

I agree. At this rate, everything on the Internet will soon be owned by eBay with their B.S. below cost listings splashed all over the place.

That is a big dissappointment. I use shopping sites like bizrate, nextag, and shopping.com to get a lot of our sales. But what really concerns me is that feebay is going to feed in their auctions onto shopping.com so I will not be using them again. I can't turn around without them getting some of my money in some sort of fee.

I can only hope that this doesn't raise price of gas

I'm going to start hording gas now to ebay later....