eBay UK & Germany September 2025 Update: Shipping Reminders & Pre-Loved Fashion Conditions
eBay has announced their September 2025 Seller Updates for UK and Germany with Shipping Reminders and a reminder to update conditions for pre-loved fashion items to comply with policy updates introduced in August.
eBay UK
Shipping Reminders
What you need to know
Getting orders out on time is a crucial part of delivering a great buyer experience and protecting your seller ratings. With our shipping reminders, we’re helping you keep your orders on track.A day after an order’s promised handling time, you’ll get an extra nudge to send it out. We’ll send these reminders via email and notify you through the eBay app if you have it.
Once you get your shipping label, you can manually add the tracking number to the order, or have it added automatically when you use eBay Labels.
After that, you’ll get two more notifications: one confirming the item's been shipped and is on its way to the buyer and another once it’s been delivered.
Next steps
There’s no action required on your end. Just keep an eye out for shipping notifications to help make sure your items reach buyers on time.
This seems like an odd feature that nobody asked for and that likely won't accomplish anything but to annoy sellers.
Why would they wait until the day after the promised handling time once the order is already late instead of reminding sellers when there is still time for them to avoid a late shipping defect?
For sellers with longer handling time, a reminder before the required shipping date might be helpful to make sure they don't miss an order, but nothing about this will be helpful for those with shorter handling times.
Pre-Loved Fashion Condition Reminder
This isn't something new, eBay apparently just didn't have anything else to add to this update, so they threw in a reminder to update conditions for pre-loved fashion (including clothing, shoes, jewelry, watches, handbags, accessories etc.) to comply with new policies introduced last month.
In our July Seller News, we announced the upcoming addition of new conditions for pre-loved fashion listings. These new options went live on 18 August, allowing you to accurately reflect the quality of your pieces and boost buyer satisfaction.
How this affects you
If you didn't update the condition on your current pre-loved fashion listings before 18 August, your listings will automatically be set to "Pre-owned: Good". We recommend you check your listings to make sure the new condition accurately describes your items.If you'd like to edit the item condition on one or more of your listings, go to Selling Activity in My eBay or Active listings in Seller Hub. If you have lots of listings, you can save time by using our bulk listing tools, which allow you to edit multiple listings at once.
What’s new
Earlier this year, we introduced new item condition options for pre-loved clothing. These gave buyers a clearer idea of your item’s condition, reducing disputes and returns for a smoother selling experience.Building on that success, we’ve expanded these new options across the rest of pre-loved fashion, on everything from jewellery to sneakers. Since 18 August, these options are available on both your new and existing listings.
Any existing ‘Pre-owned’ listings will update to ‘Pre-owned - Good.’ You’ll need to review and adjust these to the condition that best reflects your items.
Sellers must now choose Pre-owned - Excellent, Pre-owned - Good, or Pre-owned - Fair for used items in the affected categories.
The fact that eBay has to put a reminder in a seller update likely means they've seen that sellers have been slow to adopt the new conditions and they are now forcing the issue by updating any existing "Pre-owned" listings to "Pre-owned Good" automatically.
That could put sellers in a difficult position if the "Pre-owned Good" condition eBay is forcing as a default doesn't accurately reflect the actual condition of the item.
In those instances, sellers will still need to handle return requests but eBay says they are offering temporary protections for service metrics ratings to help sellers affected by this new policy avoid having their "not as described" rates exceed "very high" which would normally trigger additional penalty fees and other account restrictions.
What if a buyer wants to return an item because the item condition wasn't as expected?
If this happens, we recommend working with your buyer to resolve the issue and avoid a ’case closed without seller resolution’ label.Will eBay protect me if a buyer wants to return an item because the item condition wasn't as expected?
We’ll be offering temporary protections for ‘Item not as described’ return requests. This helps avoid a change in your service metric rating to ‘Very High.’ Please continue to handle any returns to avoid a ’case closed without seller resolution’ label.
eBay Germany
The September update for the German marketplace is exactly the same as the UK, introducing Shipping Reminders and reminding sellers to update conditions on their pre-loved fashion items.
Stay tuned for updates and announcements for the US, Canada, and Australia which will likely be coming soon!
