A longtime owner of a jewelry store in St. Clair, Mich., Patrick Coughlin viewed the hype about Black Friday and Cyber Monday as so much marketing hooey. Then he tried selling on eBay.

Coughlin was expecting a couple of hundred shoppers. But on Monday more than 1,000 mobbed his virtual store. "I was so skeptical," he said. "We didn't have any specials." Next year, he said, he'll be ready.

The annual post-Thanksgiving kickoff to the holiday shopping season brought more than 7 million shoppers to eBay's site, making it the most popular online shopping destination in the United States, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

More important, the success sent a signal to eBay's beleaguered management team that its efforts to rebalance the mix between items sold on the auction site and those sold on eBay stores were finally paying off after a monumental misstep last January.

EBay spokesman Hani Durzy said managers are "optimistic" they have turned a corner, though it is too early in the holiday shopping season to know for sure.

The error that nearly sent eBay into a tailspin was a decision, announced Jan. 18, to include items from eBay's 383,000-plus online stores at the end of search results on eBay.com.

"It's a win/win for everyone," Bill Cobb, president of eBay North America, said in announcing the shift. That turned out not to be true.

While owners of some online stores saw sales arc upward, data analysts in eBay's vast computer centers quickly noticed a troubling trend. Would-be buyers were abandoning eBay in droves.

It turned out eBay shoppers didn't want to sift through 3,000 search results for a video game or a Star Wars Pez dispenser or an old comic. "It degraded the buyer experience," Durzy said.

Less than two months later, eBay reversed the change, but the auction site remained sluggish. And eBay paid for the mistake on Wall Street, with its stock sliding more than 50 percent, from a high of $47.86 on Jan. 19 to a low of $22.83 on Aug. 3.

On Aug. 22, eBay raised prices for store owners to encourage them to list more items on the auction site. According to Cobb, only 9 percent of eBay's sales came from the stores -- as opposed to auctions -- and the fees paid by store owners didn't cover eBay's cost for hosting the stores.

Analysts began to note improvement. John Aiken, of Majestic Research, said revenue per listing has begun to accelerate after a period of decline. "It is definitely in the right direction," Aiken said. "The fee change has been very, very effective."

EBay closed at $32.32 Wednesday, and the consensus among Wall Street analysts is that its shares could rise to $34 by the end of the year.

"I think they are doing better than they were, but I don't think that's a hard and fast rule," said Jay Ferguson of Ferguson Andrews Investment Advisors. Ferguson said he owns eBay but is not planning to buy more unless the price drops. In addition, Ferguson said he wants to see what happens in the competition between PayPal and the Google Checkout service launched this year.

"PayPal is your rocket fuel," Ferguson said.

Scot Wingo, chief executive of ChannelAdvisor, which provides auction management software, said PayPal continues to be plagued by phishers, bad guys who have been able to defraud people via fake e-mails that use a person's eBay auction ID.

However, Wingo said a recent decision by eBay to hide bidders' IDs for items over $200 had "almost eliminated phishing." EBay has also launched a crackdown on sellers of counterfeit goods.

Wingo said he believes that eBay's efforts to fight fraud have had an even bigger impact than its effort to rebalance the marketplace.

"We are seeing a 5 to 10 percent increase in conversion for most of our sellers," Wingo said. "There are a lot of buyers feeling good about the marketplace now."