Will New Leadership Finally Fix eBay Customer Experience?
eBay once again has new leadership for Global Customer Experience as previous US General Manager Dawn Block takes over the role responsible for supporting both buyers and sellers on the marketplace.
Block's promotion to VP Global Customer Experience was announced this week at the Winter 2025 Seller Check In as Ron Jaiven moves to take over the GM North America position.
Liz Morton
Her predecessor, Derek Allgood, apparently left the company in June 2025 after widely being panned for his media interviews last year claiming eBay provides a "phenomenal" customer experience - an assertion many sellers found laughable.
Liz Morton
Block will certainly have her work cut out for her, inheriting a long legacy of unfulfilled promises and a customer experience that is increasingly impersonal, AI-driven and difficult to navigate for both buyers and sellers.
For example, eBay had promised it was going to "fix customer service" way back in 2017, when then SVP Global Operations & Customer Service Wendy Jones was faced with tough questions at the company's annual seller conference and acknowledged that eBay still had a lot of work to do.
Our reality today is that we don't make it easy for our customers. The rules and the systems are too complex, they are at times inconsistent, and in today's digital world of ecommerce, they're too slow......Our Unifying Purpose. We exist to help our customers and solve their problems in the quickest, simplest, easiest way possible… and make them feel great about eBay along the way.
Jones and then VP Customer Experience, North America Cathal McCarthy unveiled plans for eBay's higher tier support experience called Concierge. While it was initially promoted as an invite only program, it was made clear the plan was to make many parts of Concierge the standard support experience for all eBay sellers within 18 months...which never happened.
Despite having decidedly not fixed customer service at eBay, Jones was awarded an $11 Million bonus in 2018 by then CEO Devin Wenig ($8 Million of which was a retention bonus.)
When Jones stepped down from her position in 2020 under current CEO Jamie Iannone, she collected another $11 Million+ in severance benefits, again despite perennial complaints about falling levels of service and failing to bring Concierge to the masses - and despite her alleged role in the 2019 eBay cyberstalking scandal.
Not only did Wendy Jones not bring Concierge to all sellers, eBay has in fact acted to restrict access to the program over the last few years with sellers who had previously been granted "lifetime access" recently tossed out for not meeting unspecified and mysterious eligibility criteria.
Liz Morton
If Dawn Block wants an easy "win" as she takes on this role, restoring Concierge to those who had been promised lifetime access only to have the rug pulled out from under them would be a great start.
Another top priority for Dawn should be getting to the bottom of the mixed messaging that eBay has been putting out about payments being delayed until after delivery confirmation for some sellers for almost a year now as support agents say the policy will soon apply to all sellers, community reps so something else and sellers are left in the dark about critical cashflow impacting changes.
Liz Morton
Beyond that, both buyers and sellers worry that customer service is increasingly behind handled by AI bots that routinely get things wrong and simply don't provide the human touch that is required to truly have a "phenomenal" customer experience.
eBay's 10-Q filing in July 2023 revealed the company incurred $12 Million in increased customer support costs in the first half of 2023, but frustrated sellers wondered where it all went as the support experience continued to go downhill - specifically calling out the lack of callback options and increasingly being routed through labyrinthine automated phone menus or online self-service resources.
At the time, I speculated that $12 Million increase was due to eBay deploying more automated and AI driven support systems with the hope it would drive future cost savings.
The situation has only gotten worse since mass layoffs last year impacted roles all across the company, including global customer service.
CEO Jamie Iannone even bragged about the changes at the 2024 Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, telling investors that eBay no longer having to pay for human customer service reps to read detailed explanations from sellers about business impacting issues before responding to their requests for help is "fundamentally changing the pace of innovation" at the company.
eBay deals with a lot of customer support between buyers and sellers. And that customer agent sometimes had to read like a 12 paragraph e-mail where somebody explained it, we would hire someone to read that.
Now we have AI read that email, write the initial response. So it's fundamentally changing our pace of how we work and the pace of innovation.
Many users would likely agree this increasing erosion of support has fundamentally changed things at eBay - but not for the better.
More recently, sellers have reported trouble getting through to customer support and being sent around in AI automated circles due to apparent "call routing issues" and while some have been happy to see a new "Have Us Call You" support option popping up in Seller Hub, others worry it may be connecting them to AI voice service rather than a live human being.
Liz Morton
And of course that doesn't even touch on the many problems that can occur when AI and automation take the place of humans for critical policy enforcement, trust and safety roles.
Liz Morton
In addition to improvements to frontline customer service operations, the number one complaint I hear from sellers is about lack of communication about updates, policy changes and other business-impacting topics.
My advice to Dawn Block would be to learn from past failures, like eBay Voices, eBay Council, and the now discontinued community chats, get outside of the echo chamber bubble eBay has built and commit to truly engaging with a wider variety of sellers on a wider variety of topics.
Liz Morton
I'll close with one final suggestion for Dawn to rack up an easy customer experience win: sellers love the Check In sessions hosted by Product Marketing Managers Chuck Van Pelt and Jonathan Chard and Chuck and Jonathan also clearly love answering seller questions and taking feedback - which sounds to me like a perfect opportunity to bring back a monthly chat and/or eBay Podcast with them as hosts.
What advice or suggestions do you have for Dawn Block to improve the eBay customer experience? Let us know in the comments below!
