The eBay 2024 Summer Seller Update is live on the eBay website and includes changes to advertising; international shipping; auction payments; the messaging interface; and changes to the User Agreement.
eBay put the changes into four buckets; some of the highlights are below, so sellers should review the Seller Update pages carefully to see which ones will impact their business.
eBay is taking a holistic approach to how it presents marketing and advertising options to sellers by renaming and reorganizing services and features. This can be seen in one of its Seller Update FAQs:
What’s the difference between advertising and promotions?
Advertising refers to your Promoted Listings campaigns, which will soon live under the new Advertising tab. Your Seller Hub Promotions are a suite of marketing tools that live under the Marketing tab and allow you to offer discounts to your buyers.
We know this can be confusing—that’s why we’ll soon be renaming “Seller Hub promotions” to “discounts” to more accurately reflect what they do.
eBay is also combining Promoted Listings Standard and Advanced under Promoted Listings – sellers can choose from two different campaign strategies:
eBay also changed the name of Promoted Display to Promoted Stores and changed the name of Offsite Ads to Promoted Offsite.
eBay said sellers will also be able to view all their promotions at a glance: “Your summary page features a snapshot of all your active, scheduled, ended, and draft promotions. See where your promotions stand at a glance, and easily click in to manage any of them right from your snapshot.”
Another important change for sellers to know about: eBay is renaming “Markdown sale” to “Sale event” in the coming weeks. eBay will no longer display “Markdown sale” in the left hand navigation, explaining:
“You can now access all of your promotional tools, including Markdown sale events, from the “Promotions” option in the left hand navigation. When you select “Promotions,” you can view and manage all of your offers. From there, simply select “sale event + markdown” in the “All offers” filter to see and manage your sale events as before.”
eBay will launch a new messaging interface with an updated search feature. It will display all previous messages between buyers and sellers on the same thread, “so you’ll be able to see the context of the conversation without the hassle of sifting through multiple emails.”
It’s also launching a new Earnings report (under Payments in My eBay and Seller Hub). “When you land on the report, you’ll see a summary of your earnings, along with your gross amount, expenses, and refunds for the time period you select. From here, you can filter by date ranges, view your earnings trends, and download a report with your per-order earnings for your selected time period.”
eBay said it is working on adding a way for sellers to input cost of goods sold (COGS) to help sellers gain more insight into the overall profitability of their eBay business, “helping you price smarter, manage inventory more effectively, and grow your business.”
eBay notified sellers of a change in its eBay International Shipping service it made in April, explaining as follows:
“Keeping track of restrictions and export regulations when selling internationally can be challenging, and as a result you may have manually excluded selling in some locations. In mid-April we introduced a toggle switch within your Shipping Preferences under Exclude shipping locations that, when enabled, will allow eBay International Shipping to seamlessly handle the paperwork and shipments to locations you’ve previously excluded. This new feature aims to help make your products effortlessly available to a broader audience, while we handle the complexities of global distribution.”
eBay also announced it’s testing changes to auction payments:
“Buyers on select auctions will be required to set up a preferred payment method and shipping address before they can place a bid. After winning an auction, we’ll let them know they have one hour to adjust their order or payment details as needed, otherwise we’ll automatically process their order using their preferred payment method. No action is required from the seller.”
However, the following FAQ shows it has yet to solve for one problem with immediate auction payments:
As a seller, can I still offer combined shipping for multiple items purchased by the same buyer?
You can still combine multiple purchases from the same buyer in a single shipment, but please be aware that a buyer may be automatically charged for shipping costs for each individual item when payments are processed. In these situations, you can send buyers a refund for any excess shipping charges if you offer combined shipping discounts. In the meantime, we are actively working on solutions that reduce the likelihood of this occurring.
eBay advised sellers of new regulations going into effect in December in the EU and Northern Ireland.
eBay is making changes to its User Agreement effective immediately for new users and effective July 26, 2024 for existing users. It described the changes as follows (it does not provide a redline version to check details of changes):
eBay set up a special forum on the discussion boards to answer questions from sellers. Leave a comment on the EcommerceBytes Blog to share your thoughts on the latest Seller Update.
Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.
The combined shipping issue needs to be fixed. It can’t be that hard. Yet it has been an issue for quite some time, I am happy to do refunds, but it would a lot easier if eBay would simply allow me to send an invoice before charging the buyer automatically.
