eBay Rolls Back New Cost Of Goods Sold Feature Due To Premature Launch Failure
UPDATE 11-21-25
Some sellers are starting to see the Your Cost/Cost Of Goods Sold feature has been re-enabled in their listing form, though it appears to be possible a phased roll out not available again to all sellers just yet.
Let us know in the comments below if you are seeing the Your Cost field when creating new listings on eBay!
Sellers cheered at eBay Open 2025 when the new Cost Of Goods Sold feature was announced but a month later eBay is once again facing an embarassing premature launch failure as they're forced to roll back this frequently requested seller tool due to a "system error."
Here's what eBay told sellers about COGS at Open 2025:
Liz Morton
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.
More information about the feature was revealed in the Mastering eBay: Optimize Your Business Operations session at Open, including that this feature will initially 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).
And if the seller has entered COGS, it will be shown and used in Earnings calculations in reports and records under the Payments tab.
The presentation also showed COGS would be used to display "earnings after acquisition costs" on order detail pages.
A month after that initial announcement, eBay started to finally provide access to the new Cost Of Goods Sold feature to some seller as part of a phased roll out, but things quickly hit a snag when sellers started reporting seeing cost fields in Offers and Order Details filled in with random numbers that they did not select and which did not accurately reflect their COGS.
Liz Morton
Many sellers reported the cost on their items was showing as $3, which seemed like it might be a default amount or test data, but others saw larger and more random amounts like this seller who said an "acquisition cost" of $39.99 was shown in the Order Details for an item they sold.
Maybe I'm just a little foggy this morning and not thinking straight, I'm a newer seller and sold something overnight. When looking at the financial stuff I'm a little confused on the acquisition cost being in the negative. A screen shot is provided. Can someone explain this...
...Issue resolved, a live agent through eBay was super helpful. A field was filled out automatically when posted. Since I posted the item from a similar item that was being sold. The field is what the item cost to the seller but it's not viewable to the buyers.
Alarmingly, that seller said when they contacted eBay support, they were told the cost information was picked up because they did "sell one like this" from another seller's listing.
If true, it is absolutely unacceptable that eBay would potentially expose sensitive, proprietary seller information to competing sellers by using sell similar as a workaround.
eBay community forum staff were asked to confirm if the COGS information is copied over when using "sell one like this" from another seller's listing but they did not provide a direct answer to that question.
However, the community team did post an update today confirming that these erroneous cost figures were shown to sellers due to a "system error" and eBay has temporarily rolled back and removed access to the COGS feature as a result while they work to correct the issue.
We want to share an update about a recently discovered issue with the new “Your cost” field, currently rolling out to some sellers. This optional field allows you to enter your item acquisition cost for your bookkeeping purposes. It is private, visible only to you, and never shown to buyers.
Due to a system error, some values were mistakenly generated for some sellers. While these incorrect values may have appeared when viewing offers or orders, they were not buyer-facing, and your earnings and payouts were not impacted.
For now we have rolled back the feature, and will provide updates once it’s ready to relaunch. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Affected sellers say they've also received an email from eBay about the issue, providing a $25 credit as a "goodwill" gesture for those who were already using the COGS feature and have now once again lost access.
Update on eBay’s “Your Cost” Feature
I just received an email (and message) directly from eBay:
A system error has affected the data, so eBay is temporarily removing any cost information sellers have entered.
- Rest assured: your cost info was never visible to buyers or other sellers, and your earnings and payouts were not impacted.
- As a gesture of goodwill, eBay is issuing a $25 account credit to sellers who used the feature. This will appear in your account within 24–48 hours.
- eBay will notify us when the feature is available again, and we’ll be able to re-enter our information then.
One premature launch failure of a longtime requested seller feature would be embarrassing enough, but it's even worse for eBay when it comes to COGS as the previous attempt in August 2024 was also quickly withdrawn, due to slightly different problems with data inconsistency and inaccuracy.
Liz Morton
With over a year for testing and relaunch, how in the world did eBay let this feature go into production if it wasn't fully ready for primetime?
This is just the latest in a long line of far too frequent business-impacting technical issues, "system errors", and half-baked product launches that continue to plague the site.
Back in 2019, eBay and then CEO Devin Wenig faced activist investor pressure from Elliott Management calling for changes at the company, with constant site glitches and technical misexecution called out explicitly as one of the major problems with the platform.
Over 6 years later, it's shocking just how much of Elliott's "Enhancing eBay" plan still rings true today.
Wenig infamously said at eBay Open 2018 that technical glitches are unacceptable and really pissed him off.
eBay has since removed the video they had posted on YouTube of the eBay Open 2018 Q&A segment, but the interviewer asked:
There've been a lot of site glitches recently on eBay. What are you guys doing to get rid of them?
And Wenig responded:
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.
Mazen Rawashdeh was Chief Infrastructure and Architecture Officer at the time, but somehow managed to escape the wrath of a "pissed off" Wenig and was promoted to Chief Technology Officer, a title he still retains today despite the fact the site continues to experience far too many "glitches."
In fact, Rawashdeh was recently given even more responsibility after eBay decided to get rid of the Chief Product Officer role (which had previously been held by Eddie Garcia) and split that postion between Rawashdeh as CTO and Jordan Sweetnam as Chief Commercial Officer.
Liz Morton
That decision doesn't seem to be working out too well so far for the company as new feature development continues to lag behind and/or create embarrassing PR debacles when product launches go wrong.
How many more failed launches does Rawashdeh get before investors once again start calling for new leadership that can actually bring technical and operational excellence instead of chronic misexecution to the table?
