New eBay Ads Job Posts Hint At Cross Border Promotion Push, New Seller Analytics For Promoted Listings
eBay is hiring for several new roles in the Ads department, signaling greater focus on cross border trade, enhanced seller analytics, and additional ad products may be on the roadmap for Promoted Listings.
First, eBay is looking for a Senior Manager, Advertising Strategy and Operations who will report to Global Advertising General Manager to help inform and shape global advertising strategy.
Next, eBay is looking to hire an experienced product marketer in ad products, webstores, and ecommerce or two-sided tech networks for a Senior Product Marketing position tasked with driving "inbound product marketing and outbound go to market strategy for new advertising products and features."
That role sounds much like what sellers have seen in recent months with eBay's , Kye Mou making the Seller Circle rounds with explanatory presentations about the new Promoted Listings General attribution policies.
Liz Morton
While those sessions did offer opportunities for sellers to vent their frustration and displeasure with the new policies, predictably the "feedback" did not lead to any changes as eBay forged ahead with the controversial update that has massively increased the amount of sales incurring ad fees for many merchants.
Liz Morton
And while "providing signal amidst the noise" may be common corporate jargon, it's not likely to land well with some longtime users who believe ex-CEO John Donahoe's 2014 comments about tuning out activist investor "noise" to be a broader reflection of how eBay views their seller-base.
In recent Seller Circle and webinar sessions about eBay ads, the number request I've seen from sellers is for eBay to provide better reporting so sellers can better track how their campaigns are performing since the new attribution policy has rendered Return on Investment (ROI) practically useless.
It appears eBay may be working on that, with another job ad for a Senior Data Engineer, Ads Data Platform who will "work on the Data Platform that provides Near Real Time Performance Data and Insights to the large portion of eBay’s 18 million active sellers who use advertising products, including Promoted Listings, Promoted Stores, and Promoted Offsite, and plays a critical role in growing eBay’s nearly $2B Ads Business."
Interestingly, this job ad is the first place I've seen eBay state their number of Active Sellers since Q4 2021, which was the last time it was officially included in quarterly financial reports.
At that time, Active Sellers (defined as an account which had completed at least one sale in the previous 12 months) had declined from 20 Million in Q1 2021 to 17 Million in Q4 2021 - at which point eBay stopped publicly disclosing the number.
If this job ad is correct, that means eBay may have only about ~1 Million more Active Sellers today than they did ~4 years ago, and there's no way to know if that number is only counting Active Sellers across the global eBay platform or also includes other marketplaces eBay has acquired since then like TCGPlayer, Tise and the soon to close deal to buy Depop from Etsy.
It will be interesting to see if eBay officially includes Active Sellers when they report Q1 2026 earnings, which will likely be in late April/early May.
On the Q4 2025 earnings report, eBay said that about 4.8 Million sellers adopted at least one promoted listing product during the quarter - so opinions may vary about whether that really constitutes a "large portion" of ~18 Million sellers.
Liz Morton
Beyond that, it looks like this role will be "craft[ing] a platform for eBay sellers and advertisers to measure, in near real time, the performance of their advertising campaigns."
If that sounds familiar, remember that eBay launched a "new" Ads dashboard in 2024 that reduced transparency while failing to deliver on promises of providing a more intuitive design and advanced tech.
Liz Morton
And since eBay continues to advise metrics are reported in "near real-time" but it may take 72 hours or longer for reports in the ad dashboard to "reconcile", it's safe to say they still have a very different definition of "near-real time" than most sellers.
Finally, eBay is also looking for Cross Border Trade Ads Seller Engagement Specialist based in Shenzhen, China, showing that for all of eBay's recent regional consumer to consumer C2C efforts, they're are still heavily leaning on imports from China especially in key categories like Motors Parts and Accessories.
Liz Morton
The eventual hire for this role must be fluent in Mandarin and English and be familiar with advertising on other platforms like Amazon and Google.
The hiring spree comes as eBay continues looking to Amazon for advertising strategy inspiration and beta tests new ad products like Custom Store Ads for Ambassador affiliates and eBay Live events as well as video ads for Promoted Listings Priority cost per click ads.
Liz Morton
