eBay Open 2025 Day Two: Product Presentations, Q&A & Feedback Sessions
eBay kicked off Day 2 of their annual seller conference, eBay Open 2025 with a keynote speech from Chief Commercial Officer Jordan Sweetnam and other executives.
Full replays are available on eBay's YouTube channel and they also posted a breakdown of key announcements in a community forum post, but here are a few highlights from the virtual sessions Value Added Resource attended today.
Keynote
Jordan and the other keynote presenters have spent a lot of time talking about eBay Live livestream selling, promoting it as the future of selling on the platform and encouraging sellers to check it out - which seems odd considering it is still an extremely limited feature that is only available to select approved sellers and 90%+ of the sellers in the room and online probably wouldn't be approved if they applied.
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Today's keynote also touched on a few of the announcements from yesterday, including new Item Not Received protections for sellers who use eBay labels coming soon.
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eBay announced a new Open Banking feature today, using seller provided off site financial data to enhance lending and financing offerings.
While this may be useful for multi-channel sellers who sell through other marketplaces as well, it's questionable how comfortable sellers will be with sharing their off site financial data with eBay and/or financing partners like YouLend and Liberis.
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In the segment on brand strategy, VP Global Consumer Insights and VP Global Brand and Media Email O'Hara talked about the various ways eBay is showing up to attract buyers from partnerships with Vogue to the Things People Love campaign that eBay launched last year starting in clothing categories and expanding into other focus verticals.
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O'Hara also promoted eBay's efforts to recruit influencers to help bring in more Gen Z shoppers, but interestingly did not mention that eBay has recently made major changes to the eBay Partner Network affiliate program, killing off the final value fee incentive that used to be offered to sellers through this program.
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And sellers were encouraged to look into Pro Seller Program and other growth and coaching opportunities that may be available to them from eBay.
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Senior Director Trust David Newman says in October, eBay will have sellers' backs on For Parts/Not Working returns with Final Sale blocking remorse return reasons, a 3 day limit on Item Not Described return requests, and buyers having to provide detailed pictures to prove INAD claims.
Sellers in the live audience reacted very positively to this announcement, but the devil will be in the details and we'll see how it actually works in practice once it rolls out.
Newman also says eBay will be expanding buyer verification for auction bidding, requiring phone number verification for most bidders and government ID and selfie verification for high-value items - a move that proved to be very controversial in testing.
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And in a getting to know the eBay exec segment later in the day, VP Seller Experience Xiaodi Zhang revealed that sellers will soon be able to upload videos to their listings within the eBay app - a feature sellers have been asking for since video in listings was first introduced in 2021.
Mastering eBay: Optimize Your Business Operations
In the Mastering eBay: Optimize Your Business Operations workshop, we got more in depth information about the Cost of Goods Sold feature that was announced yesterday.
Sellers will be able to enter COGS in both the single listing form and bulk listing/editing tools.
And if the seller has entered COGS, it will be shown and used in Earnings calculations in reports and records under the Payments tab.
Initially, this feature will only work for single item listings (though they can be multi-quantity) and is not available for listings with multiple variations. It also only supports a weighted average cost accounting model and does not allow for other methods like First In, First Out (FIFO).
Multi-User Account Access (MUAA) is now called Team Access, but it doesn't appear there have been other significant changes or updates to this feature.
Q&A Sessions:
The Q&A session on eBay Ads provided some helpful answers to seller questions about ad strategies and when/how to use different types of ads but was notably missing any discussion about the controversial ad attribution changes which have rolled out in Germany, UK, Australia, Italy, France, and Spain.
Sellers have been concerned that recent changes to help and policy pages indicate that eBay will be expanding this attribution model to the US soon.
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Several people attempted to ask about it during this Q&A session (including me) and not only were the questions completely ignored - they were actually being deleted from the Q&A tab so that others couldn't see them either!
Cleary, eBay doesn't want to talk about it - which probably tells us everything we need to know.
In the Q&A session on Customer Service, a seller asked about the increasingly common practice some sellers are running into with payments being held on all order until 72 hours after delivery.
For months now eBay has been creating a lot of confusion with a policy page that clearly says these payout delays are an account basis and based on specific risk criteria while notification emails and conversations with support say the policy will be applied to all sellers.
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Here's what the Q&A session said about the subject:
Randy R asks the question, is eBay changing all sellers to devliery plus 72 hours for seller payouts by the end of the year like customer service is telling people? If so, are they going to defer shipping costs and promoted listing fees until payout at this time?
It is my understanding that there's not an intent for all sellers to move to that. And typically we will handle this on a seller by seller basis or on a account by account basis. So if you're experiencing some of those delayed payouts there, it is absolutely something that you should look into with our customer service department, but it's my understanding at this time that's not an intent for all sellers.
Search Best Practices from eBay & Google
In the Search Best Practices from eBay & Google session, eBay shared one piece of data that is sure to be controversial with sellers, saying that ending and relisting items ultimately hurts more than it helps.
With a representative from Google as part of this presentation, there were also several points made about how Google will reject listings from search if the images don't comply with their policies which require the picture to be of the item only with no text or watermarks.
That prompted a seller in the Q&A segment to question how they could still protect their intellectual property rights and prevent theft or misuse of their images while avoiding being blocked by Google.
Surprisingly Senior Manager eBay Advertising, Alan Feder, admitted that eBay is working on how to use AI to remove seller watermarks to provide a clean image to Google while maintaining the image with watermarks for on eBay search.
We're actually trying to leverage some AI technology between both Google and eBay to say like well if you guys submitted a bunch of pictures with watermarks, we don't want to go back and ask you to correct them, can we correct them ourselves? We keep the watermark version on eBay and then we have a non-watermarked version that we send to Google, so that doesn't get rejected.
So we're trying to mitigate that, but it's absolutely a huge issue with watermarks, logos, text, brand names...anything that's not a picture of the item just don't put on there.
Not only does that answer not address the actual concerns of the seller who asked, it also raises serious concerns that eBay may be altering seller provided images with AI without notice or disclosure - which not only presents potential IP rights violations but also could cause Item Not As Described issues if the AI altered image doesn't exactly and precisely represent the actual item being sold.
I'll be following up with eBay to try to get more information about this issue - stay tuned for updates!
UPDATE 9-8-25
CEO Jamie Iannone's comments at Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2025 appear to confirm that eBay is using AI to alter seller provided images for offsite advertising purposes (emphasis mine).
We have the original format we launched ten years ago—promoted listings general, our CPA continues to be our largest contributor to growth. We’re leaning into new formats like promoted stores and promoted offsite, helping drive new growth.
It's another area where we're able to leverage AI to drive the experience. For example, we're using AI in recommendations and search technologies to drive more relevant listings.
We're able to use it to actually change images for promoted offsite, putting more compelling and compliant images out there to help our sellers promote offsite - buying ads on third parties like Google through eBay - because they're able to leverage all our AI expertise.
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Sellers
Seller Advocacy Feedback Session Listing & Selling Workflow
Product Marketing Manager and Seller Advocate Chuck Van Pelt and Product Marketing Manager Jonathan Chard hosted a feedback session for sellers tuning in virtually to ask questions and make suggestions about listing and selling workflows.
Unfortunately, most of the session was led by Chuck and Jonathan having sellers simply tick pre-written boxes on interactive polls and discussing the results rather than tackling questions in sellers' own words typed in the Q&A tab - the actual Q&A only represented the last ~10 minutes of the 45+ minute session.
Interestingly, when asked their opinion on the end and relist question, they took a more nuanced approach, advising sellers to test and see what works best for their specific account or business.
A seller asked about simplified shipping, saying another platform they use has a flat rate shipping option under 5 lbs and wondering if eBay would ever offer something similar.
Jonathan mentioned that eBay is doing managed shipping in the UK and could potentially look into what kinds of similar offerings might make sense in the US as well - and while he didn't mention it, eBay has been surveying sellers recently on exactly that topic.
Liz Morton
Side Note: for anyone who was excited when one of the seller led sessions said the Listing Quality Report will be rolling out to all sellers, I hate to burst your bubble but we've heard that before and I wouldn't hold your breath.
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And that's it for the Value Added Resource eBay Open 2025 Day 2 recap! I'll be updating once replays of other sessions are available and stay tuned for more coverage as the event wraps up tomorrow.
Catch on coverage from Day 1:
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Day 3:
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And the full playlist of videos from eBay's YouTube channel:
