eBay Seller Webinar Promotes New Community Amid Search, Moderation Concerns
eBay is using its July seller webinar to spotlight the newly rebuilt eBay Community, leaning into seller-to-seller engagement just weeks after moving the forums to a new platform powered by Bevy.
The upcoming “Grow Your Business With the eBay Community” webinar will focus on “the power of community and how it can help you grow your business,” according to eBay’s announcement.
seller_news_team
The session will feature eBay sellers and Community Mentors Danielle Craun and Sergey Polukhin, along with Valeri Yee, Senior Manager of Seller Community & Engagement, for an hour dedicated to helping sellers get more out of the new eBay Community platform.
eBay says sellers attending the event will learn how to:
- Navigate the redesigned eBay Community platform
- Stay up to date on Seller News, events, and announcements
- Get trusted answers from experienced Community Mentors through the Ask a Mentor board
- Connect with fellow sellers through Seller Circles
Those topics are timely as sellers have been struggling with navigating the new forums, expressing frustration with the format and lack of certain features that had been available in the previous version.
As Value Added Resource previously reported, eBay moved the Community away from Khoros in June, promising a more centralized experience bringing together events, discussions, resources and search.
eBay said at the time that most contributions and activity from 2023 onward would be moved to the new platform, raising questions about censorship and the loss of important records of historic seller-impacting issues as well as eBay responses and communication.
Liz Morton
After the new forum opened, early seller reaction was mixed. Some users welcomed the cleaner look and more modern structure, while others criticized confusing navigation, too many notifications, lack of native dark mode, missing private messages and AI-generated discussion summaries.
And the censorship concerns have continued with automated AI moderation holding posts in pending status or removing them completely in some cases.
There also appears to be a more subtle visibility issue in play, with eBay’s forum search currently making it difficult to find discussions about GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen's unsolicited $56B takeover proposal.
eBay officially rejected the bid in May, but Cohen has continued to increase GameStop's position in eBay and press his case to shareholders, criticizing current management, board oversight, operational execution, and governance failures.
Cohen also surprised many eBay sellers by taking his pitch directly to them in interviews with YouTube channels Justin Resells and Ralli Roots, showing a level of candor and engagement many say has been sorely lacking from CEO Jamie Iannone and other current eBay leaders.
Liz Morton
Naturally, sellers have been discussing these interviews and the larger GameStop takeover bid in the eBay community forum both before and after the migration - but you wouldn't know that from using the search bar on the new platform.
When looking for a particular discussion on this topic last week, I noticed the search returned no results for the word GameStop.
However, doing a site search for community.ebay.com in Google returned multiple links to forum posts on the topic.
Clicking through on those links from Google brought me to the thread in question, so eBay did not remove them completely - which would have been a more obvious form of censorship.
To test whether it was just a technical issue affecting search in general, I tried a few other keywords that eBay may not necessarily appreciate users talking about, such as competing marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, or Mercari.
Those searches all worked as expected with many results returned, suggesting GameStop may have been singled out for a search exclusion or visibility restriction, whether by design or as the result of a platform configuration issue.
Interestingly, the same search limitation does not appear to have been applied to the other community forums localized for the UK, Canada, Australia, and Germany - all of which return normal and expected search results for posts containing the word GameStop.
It's certainly not the first, or perhaps even worst, example of censorship in the eBay community - heavy-handed moderation and mass perma-banning events have frustrated users and stifled feedback in the forums for many years.
Liz Morton
But the spotlight currently on eBay due to the GameStop takeover bid makes this example look especially petty.
In addition to moderation concerns, sellers have grown disillusioned with the lack of meaningful support or presence from eBay staff both in the forums and across social channels.
The old weekly community chats with eBay staff have slowly been phased out across the US, UK, Canada and Germany.
Seller Circle events and webinars have continued, but the format increasingly puts seller hosts and community mentors in the middle, with eBay staff appearing more selectively.
Liz Morton
That approach can be useful when experienced sellers are sharing practical advice, but it also raises questions about whether the eBay Community is being used to improve communication with sellers or to shift more of the burden of seller support onto unpaid users and carefully selected advocates.
In that light, this webinar is more than a basic platform walkthrough - it's a prime opportunity for eBay to show a renewed commitment to real seller engagement, if the company chooses to use it.
