eBay Adds New Features To Ambassador Storefronts, Giving Affiliates More Design Control
eBay is adding new features to their Ambassador program storefronts, giving affiliates more control over how curated collections are displayed to potential buyers.
The Ambassador program officially launched in April 2025, allowing buyers, sellers, and creators to earn up to 7.5% commission for promoting select listings.
Liz Morton
Ambassadors can select from a variety of suggested listings for items to promote and create a customized "storefront" collection to showcase items from across eBay, similar to the "curated storefront" the company launched for specialized holiday influencer collaborations and more last year.
Liz Morton
One of the top complaints I've seen about Ambassador storefronts is that it wasn't always easy for affiliates to identify and remove items that are out of stock, leading to potentially negative buyer experiences - but eBay is working to fix that problem as part of their latest updates to the program.
We’re excited to share a few new updates to your eBay Ambassador account, each one inspired by your feedback and designed to help your storefront shine!
Pin your favorite collections
You can pin multiple collections to the top of your storefront, giving your audience quick access to your favorites - no matter when they were created.Choose how items appear on your storefront
You’re no longer limited to featuring items from a single collection. Display every item you’ve saved right on your main storefront or choose up to four collections to feature!Quickly remove sold-out items
Sold-out items are already automatically moved to the bottom of your collections, but now you can filter and quickly remove them from your collections for easier management.
Along with the updates, eBay provided a new help page with step by step instructions for setting up an Ambassador storefront, along with an AI powered chatbot to answer any questions Ambassadors may have about the program.
Interestingly, while there doesn't appear to be an option to actually add links to social media profiles within the Ambassador dashboard, the storefront mockup image eBay shows to program participants indicates that may either been an option that has now been abandoned or is a feature eBay has on the roadmap for the future.
The inclusion of links to Instagram and Tik Tok could prove to be a double edged sword for eBay.
While the Ambassador program depends on users to leverage their social following to drive traffic to eBay, it could be risky to have Ambassador storefronts directing people already on eBay to social platforms that are also competitors - especially now that TikTok is aiming to take a bite out of the high end collectibles market with its new auction offering and is reportedly close to surpassing eBay in estimated quarterly GMV.
Liz Morton
eBay has made a similar mistake with their livestream selling feature, now scrambling to expand Live into more categories and countries in stark contrast to their position just a few short months ago at eBay Open 2025 in August, where General Manager eBay Live Caroline Pougnier inexplicably encouraged smaller sellers who were interested in livestreaming to use competing sites to get comfortable with live selling and build an audience.
Liz Morton
During the eBay Open Live Seller Panel titled Thriving in Real-Time Commerce, Pougnier told attendees:
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, which has raised many questions about whether executive leadership truly understands the current competitive landscape.
Liz Morton
For example, 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 was absolutely wild to hear the General Manager of eBay Live 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 followed Pougnier's advice and became successful with live selling by growing a sizeable following on Whatnot, TikTok or Instagram, why in the world would she want to come back groveling for a chance to be let into eBay Live?
eBay now seems to have reversed course somewhat from that monumentally short-sighted position, recently opening Live up to more sellers and more categories in the US while expanding internationally, but one has to wonder how much potential revenue eBay foolishly handed to their competitors in the meantime.
And while the Ambassador program is currently mostly being marketed to influencers who may not actually sell on eBay directly themselves, it can also be used by sellers who want to send up a storefront to earn commision if they share links to their own items or items posted by other sellers.
eBay previously encouraged sellers to sign up to the eBay Partner Network program so that they could not only earn commissions for promoting other people's items (if they chose to do so), but they could essentially sell fee-free by promoting their own items due to the Seller Incentive that provided a credit in the amount of the Final Value Fee for those sales.
Unfortunately, eBay quietly killed off that Seller Incentive earlier this year, giving only 2 days notice before making this massive change to the EPN terms.
Liz Morton
Now, sellers can still use the Ambassador program to promote their own items (assuming they qualify), but with a maximum cap of 7.5% commission, it likely won't cover the full Final Value Fee amount in most categories.
And the commissions available through eBay's affiliate programs are also not nearly as favorable to sellers as the social sharing incentive that was promised back in 2021 but never actually launched.
Sellers should be aware that if their items are shared in any Ambassador program "storefronts" or links, it could end up costing them more in ad fees if their items are enrolled in Promoted Listings, especially once once new attribution policies for General cost per sale ads go into effect in January.
Liz Morton
When accessing one of these curated storefronts, if you click on an item, it may show a "quick view" pop up which allows the buyer to skip the item page and head directly to check out - and that action along with add to cart or other interactive functionality would count for attribution according to the most recent Marketing Terms update.
eBay also provides Ambassadors with easy sharing tools to post individual items to social media, but sellers have raised concerns that other similar "social sharing" features may be adding tracking information that triggers ad attribution as well,
Liz Morton
What do you think of eBay's latest updates to the Ambassador affiliate program? Let us know in the comments below!
