eBay Live Dazzles With Celebs & eBay Open 2025 Panels, But Limited Access Leaves Sellers On Sidelines
eBay Live was the apparent belle of the ball at this year's eBay Open 2025 seller conference, with celebrity appearances, workshops and panels, but with livestream selling access still extremely limited, who is all the hype really for?
Day 2 of eBay Open kicked off with a keynote speech from Chief Commercial Officer Jordan Sweetnam promoting eBay Live as the future of selling on the platform, encouraging sellers to check it out and the company even brought in the Backstreet Boys for a celebrity Live guest appearance.
But all the hype about eBay Live seems odd considering it is still an extremely limited feature that is only available to select approved accounts in a handful of categories and 90%+ of the sellers in the room and watching online probably wouldn't be approved if they applied.
Here's what eBay currently says about Live eligibility:
Express your interest in live selling with eBay
eBay Live is currently available with select sellers–and growing. Please let us know if you’d like to experience eBay Live selling and we’ll notify you as soon as you’re eligible to start selling live.We’re quickly opening new categories, and applications for all categories are welcome. Current live selling categories include Collectibles and Luxury.
Collectible items include sports trading cards, collectible toys, and comics. Luxury items include watches, handbags, and jewelry.
Check back soon to see new live selling categories.
From viewing the available schedule of daily streams, it does appear they have started to open up a few other categories as well like coins and bullion and clothing and the current application for eBay Live lists these categories:
- Breaks
- STC - Breaks
- STC - Singles
- Sports Mem
- Coins & Bullion
- Comics
- CCG
- Fashion - Handbags
- Fashion - Jewelry
- Fashion - Watches
- Fashion - Apparel
- Fashion - Sneakers
- Fashion - Streetwear
- Toys
But the criteria for sellers to qualify is still very strict and leans heavily toward those who have extensive previous live selling experience and an established following on other platforms.
Just a few examples of questions on the eBay Live seller application:
During the eBay Open Live Seller Panel titled Thriving in Real-Time Commerce, I wondered what would happen if a seller in attendance gets excited from hearing about the feature but doesn't qualify for livestreaming on eBay - would they simply go to competing sites like Whatnot, Poshmark, TikTok, Instagram, or other social media sites?
Shockingly, not only does it seem that's likely going to be the result - General Manager eBay Live Caroline Pougnier actually even explicitly encouraged it!
First, Pougnier inexplicably claimed that eBay Live is still in its "earliest stages" despite the fact that it launched over 3 years ago - in June 2022 - in the US and has been live for over a year in the UK as well, even though eBay continues to stretch the truth about that too.
Liz Morton
Okay, so the next question is when is eBay live going to be open for more Sellers and more categories? And what's required to be eligible?
So our vision of course is to have eBay live be open to all trusted sellers on the platform. We're really keen on building a platform that has the best sellers who are very trusted because a lot can go wrong if you've got a not great or not very ethical seller.
At the moment though the technology is still in its earliest stages and so we're partnering with those who have existing livestreaming experience so that they can help us build the platform and make it ready for a broader audience. We're going to be opening up little by little as the platform gets more mature.
At the moment in order to join, you should have existing livestreaming experience and/or a very active social media community, in addition, of course to fantastic access to inventory.
Even more mind-blowing, when a small seller in the live audience asked how she could get into live selling if she didn't qualify for eBay Live, Pougnier explicitly told the seller she should start by practicing livestreaming and building an audience on other social media sites - an idea the seller had not previously considered before today!
Seller: my question is related to what you were just talking about. So I am a smaller seller. I am dying to get on to the Live platform and as I was applying I realized that I don't have any of the qualifications that you're looking for.
I have 998 followers on Tik Tok and a very small Instagram. So, what would you recommend for platforms for us that want to get into this business but cannot quite yet get onto eBay?
Caroline: Yeah. So it sounds like you're already doing the work of building a social media following, have you practiced going live on those platforms?
Seller: I have not and I really didn't think about that.
Caroline: I think that's a really good first step because first of all, you get used to being in front of the camera, moderating an audience, you get used how the chat goes. And also you'll find that you're following will grow much faster as you start live on social media platforms.
eBay has a long history of blundering into telling their customers to spend more time on competitor sites over the last few years which has raised many questions about whether CEO Jamie Iannone realizes Meta is a direct competitor for both buyers and sellers with Facebook Marketplace.
Liz Morton
As @unsuckEBAY so presciently explained in 2021, continuing to funnel users to Facebook for support, engagement and live shopping seemed like a bad move, especially in light of how StockX took a big bite out of eBay's sneaker business in 2019.
Earlier this year, eBay did in fact make a deal with Meta, announcing a partnership which allows eBay items to be listed on Facebook Marketplace - but it's important to note that the integration directs the buyer from Facebook to eBay to complete the transaction, so in theory it should be a net gain for eBay rather than a risk of losing existing users to a competitor.
Liz Morton
That being said, it is absolutely wild to me that the General Manager of eBay Live is now actively encouraging sellers who are apparently too small for eBay to care about to go pay their dues (quite literally in the form of selling fees) and hone their live selling skills elsewhere.
If that small seller follows Pougnier's advice and becomes successful with live selling by growing a sizeable following on TikTok or Instagram, why in the world would she want to come back groveling for a chance to be let into eBay Live?
That just seems monumentally short-sighted - if the goal really was to get average eBay sellers interested in eBay Live.
But what if eBay doesn't really want to take the risks involved in opening up Live to a wider variety of sellers and is perfectly happy keeping a restricted to a small number of experienced live sellers with high value inventory in key categories?
It might seem silly for eBay to go through this whole dog and pony show at eBay Open and the recently announced eBay Live On Tour with multiple pop-up events across the country if that is the case, until you stop to think that the audience for these events might not be average sellers, but eBay investors and analysts who will read the press releases and friendly media coverage of these events.
Many sellers have been frustrated with the glacial pace of the eBay Live rollout over the last 3 years and the restrictive application process - with some moving to competing sites like Whatnot (which surpassed $3 Billion in GMV in 2024) or Poshmark, and others, like mega-seller Rick Probstein, saying they're going to launch their own platforms instead.
Liz Morton
And it's not hard to imagine that investors have also been frustrated with the slow roll of eBay Live while smaller, scrappy upstart competitors have gained an early foothold, especially in categories like collectibles where eBay should have easily dominated, if they had really tried.
One of the biggest hurdles eBay has faced to gaining buyer adoption for Live may not be marketing, but rather persistent technical problems that make the user experience inconsistent and, in some cases, practically unusable.
For example, last year's Elton John Charity Event turned into an embarrassing debacle with terrible pixelation, extreme lag and buffering distracting and disrupting the event.
Liz Morton
A year later, it seems eBay has gotten most of the bugs worked out and the increasing competition and pressure from investors to meet Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) and Active Buyer targets appears to have lit a fire to finally start trying to catch up with themed shopping days and special events, not to mention generous discounts for buyers and subsidized lower fees for sellers, to boost adoption rates.
Liz Morton
Time will tell if it will pay off and in the end, the real goal of the hype may be exactly that - to buy more time to catch up on 3 years of squandered opportunities before investors start to look beyond the press releases into the actual results.
