The advantages I can see from the example you provided are it's skim-ability.
To me it looks like Ebay is exploiting a cognitive trick similar to what Spritz's quick reading technology is doing.

Where text is in relation to eachother is very important to lowering the cognitive load required to understand why it is there, to illustrate my point I will take the drop-down menu from your example and replace the words to the right of their context descriptions with their word-types...
Time: adverb adjective
Price+Shipping: adjective number
Price+Shipping: adjective number
Price: adjective number
Distance: adjective number
adjective noun
Number of bids: adjective number
Number of bids: adjective number
This information is provided in such a way that it would barely matter if there were spelling mistakes in the context describers (text on the left) because your brain has already assumed what the text is saying without cognitively thinking about it
S1M1L4RLY, Y0UR M1ND 15 R34D1NG 7H15 4U70M471C4LLY W17H0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17.
Either their brilliant, or it was just luck, maybe a bit of both. Nice question though! hope this helps.