eBay Open 2025 Day One: New Features, Tools & Seller Protections
eBay kicked off their annual seller conference, eBay Open 2025 with an opening keynote speech from CEO Jamie Iannone.
Day one was all about new seller tools and features from AI for messaging to automated feedback and enhanced seller protections against Item Not Received claims.
AI Assistant for Messaging
For many sellers, managing a high volume of buyer messages, while a sign of strong community interest, can be a daily challenge, especially for questions whose answers can already be found in the item description. Enter eBay’s new AI Assistant for messaging, rolling out to users this week on the eBay mobile app and web in the U.S. and U.K.
This opt-in tool drafts suggested replies to common buyer questions about item specifics or shipping using only the information already in listing description and order details. Responses are not sent automatically; rather sellers can review, edit, or dismiss each suggestion. That means no guesswork and no generic answers — just accurate, editable responses to help sellers save time without giving up control.
More details and a walkthrough of how the feature works:
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Offers in Messaging
Negotiating a great deal is at the heart of the eBay experience and a key pillar behind our community of enthusiast buyers and sellers. With Offers in Messaging, buyers and sellers can now negotiate offers directly within the messaging thread. That means sending, receiving, countering, and accepting offers without switching screens — all while tracking past offers and messages in one place.
Available via the eBay mobile app and web in the U.S., this update will make price negotiation faster, easier, and more intuitive, helping sellers close more deals while delivering a seamless buying experience.
Track Your Costs
Sellers who buy inventory with resale in mind know that tracking item-level costs is crucial for profitability, which is why eBay is introducing an optional “Your cost” field in the listing flow to input, update, and manage their costs with ease. Once an item has resulted in a sale, sellers can also input and update their cost from the earnings page.
This results in smarter pricing decisions without needing a separate spreadsheet or tool. Sellers can update the cost data at any time and use it to plan promotions, adjust ad rates, and more confidently price their inventory. It will also feed into their earnings page, which is located under the Seller Hub Payments tab.
FYI - this one isn't really new, eBay actually tried to launch this in August 2024 but quickly withdrew it after an embarrassing premature launch failure.
Liz Morton
And even if it technically works this time, eBay may still face reticence from sellers who are leary of the idea of sharing their cost of goods data with eBay - with many believing no good can come from letting eBay know what their costs and profit margins are.
Why would I tell them? My margin is their opportunity. To quote Bezos generally.
— Pat(ricia) (@materialculture) August 12, 2025
Inventory Mapping API
eBay’s new Inventory Mapping API makes it easier than ever to manage large inventories by bringing the time-saving magic of AI-powered listing to sellers who operate at scale. With just a few inputs — like images, product identifiers, and catalog aspects — the API generates optimized titles, item specifics, descriptions, and more. It’s fast, scalable, and built to let sellers focus on what matters: growing their businesses and connecting with buyers.
This tool will begin rolling out to select U.S. sellers in the coming weeks.
While this tool may be useful for some very large sellers, it's likely not interesting or applicable for 99.99% of sellers attending eBay Open either in person or virtually.
Seller Item Not Received (INR) Protections
A major pain point for our sellers happens when delivery delays lead to INR claims and unexpected refunds, only for the item to arrive days later. Starting in October, eBay will introduce a new improvement to enhance trust and reduce friction from these premature INR claims.
If a seller ships on time with eBay labels and tracked shipping, and tracking shows the item as delivered after a refund is issued, eBay will reimburse the seller for the item cost and remove any negative or neutral feedback left as a result of delayed delivery. This ensures sellers aren’t penalized for delays outside their control, and reinforces our commitment to standing behind sellers who do the right thing.
These new protections are a long time coming but the fact that it is limited only to those who purchase labels from eBay will mean the perk will not apply to many sellers, especially larger ones who still prefer to use their own labels because they have negotiated better rates with the carriers directly.
And while it's far from being a full fledged managed shipping offering like Simple Delivery in the UK, this could be a first step toward nudging more sellers into using eBay shipping labels.
Liz Morton
Automated Feedback
Great transactions deserve recognition, and more feedback means more trust from future buyers, as well as greater visibility into seller excellence — but today, only about one in three buyers chooses to leave feedback.
Beginning in September, when a seller in the U.S. uses a tracked service, delivers on time, and no issues are reported, eBay will automatically leave positive feedback for the seller if the buyer hasn’t already done so.
It’s a simple way to ensure sellers’ reliability and professionalism are reflected publicly, even when buyers stay quiet.
This one also isn't exactly new, but is simply an expansion of a program that first started in the UK, then was rolled out the US for new sellers late last year.
Liz Morton
Presumably, eBay will be using the same guidelines they already have in place for Automatic Feedback for those with less than 10 feedback, which is currently done in the following circumstances:
- The buyer doesn't leave feedback within 7 days of delivery (as confirmed by tracking)
- Tracking shows the item was delivered on time
- eBay can’t see any indication of an issue with the transaction
Automated feedback will remain visible unless there is an indication that there was an issue with the transaction, for example the item was damaged or the buyer opens a return. If this happens, eBay will remove the automated message.
Buyers can still leave their own feedback within 60 days of delivery, in which case the automated feedback will be replaced with their comments.
Chief AI Officer Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov and VP Seller Experience Xiaodi Zhang introduced most of the new features above and also highlighted a few other not new features like AI background enhancement, the bulk AI listing tool (when it works) and Magical AI Listing which many sellers say hasn't lived up to the hype.
Liz Morton
Nitzan and Xiaodi also said that the roadmap for eBay AI tools includes optimizing existing listings with market data and price suggestions, predictive tools, automated listings, and agentic AI - but there were no real details on how those plans may manifest in the future.
Chief Technology Officer Mazen Rawashdeh stumbled through his section of the keynote, nervously struggling with the teleprompter, so it's not clear if there was supposed to be more in this section that ended up being skipped over.
Maybe he was having flashbacks to a pissed off Devin Wenig being grilled about tech issues at eBay Open 2018 & the fallout with activist investors in 2019?
Wenig infamously said that technical glitches are unacceptable and really pissed him off. Interestingly, eBay has recently removed the YouTube video of this interview - but here's what the transcript said:
There've been a lot of site glitches recently on eBay. What are you guys doing to get rid of them?
Here's the simple answer - unacceptable, unacceptable. And we're making a lot of changes. When you make changes there are times that things happen but that's not an excuse and it's not ok with me and this summer in particular there have been a number of issues that directly impacted sellers like people not being able to see their view counts and a few other things and it's just not ok.
I'm extremely proud of a lot of things we've done, I'm not proud of that and in fact I hold my team accountable and it's not important, it's an internal matter but, we made changes to people and teams because shipping product that isn't ready is not ok. It's not ok with me and it's not ok with my team.
So the short answer is it's not like we don't get it. We are making a lot of changes and I want to make those changes, we need to make those changes, but making changes and then having to back up and fix things is not cool and I totally get it. Most of the issues from this summer have now been remedied but I was pissed off.
Rawashdeh was Chief Infrastructure and Architecture Officer at that time, but somehow managed to escape the wrath of a "pissed off" Wenig.
He was then promoted to Chief Technology Officer in 2019, after a brief period where he co-led Core Product & Tech along with Mohan Patt when Steve Fisher was being shuffled from CTO to SVP Payments "in order to focus on a personal matter."
eBay then faced activist investor pressure from Elliott Management in 2019 calling for changes at the company, with constant site glitches and technical misexecution called out explicitly as one of the major problems plaguing the platform.
Six years later, it's shocking just how much of Elliott's "Enhancing eBay" plan still rings true today as the site continues to experience frequent business impacting technical problems under Rawashdeh's leadership.
While I can empathize with the apparent stage fright, that doesn't change the fact that eBay still has a long way to go toward doing all that it takes to ensure the consistent technical reliability of the platform - or that AI may just be the latest promising future technology that will add little value if the core platform continues to have critical functionality failures.
The opening day activities concluded with Jamie hosting a short panel discussion with a few sellers on general topics like why they sell on eBay and tips they have for other sellers to make the most of their eBay businesses.
Full playlist of eBay Open 2025 videos from eBay:
Value Added Resource coverage of Day 2:
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And Day 3:
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What was your favorite part of eBay Open 2025 Day 1? Let us know in the comments below!
