eBay held a “48 Hours of Drops” livestream shopping event on Thursday and Friday (March 26-27, 2026). However, some visitors to eBay and its app were confused by eBay’s marketing of the event, thinking that eBay had redirected them to the eBay Live platform where the sale was taking place.
One seller told us that several of her customers asked her about it – “I don’t know why there isn’t a thread about eBay’s new love “Live Sales”. It has overtaken my homepage and everyone I know.” She said she believed the marketing campaign also negatively impacted her sales and watchers.
On eBay’s Instagram post about the sale, a shopper wrote, “@ebay is there a way to remove all the live sales stuff from the main homepage on eBay? It pushed all of my recent views and stuff like that way down to the bottom of the page. I don’t want anything to do with live sales and won’t participate in them so would like to remove them if possible.”
Another commented, “They’re trying so hard to be like @whatnot,” referencing livestreaming auction platform WhatNot. (Note: beware of links posted by commenters on social media sites like Instagram.)
One shopper was so concerned they posted a message on the eBay Technical Issues board titled, “Hijacked to eBay live” with the message: “Why, when I conduct a desktop seller hub search for “white horse rapids” (without the quotation marks) I am taken directly to eBay live. What is happening?”
Frequent commentor and eBay guru Wastingtime101 responded by tagging an eBay moderator and stating that they themselves had chosen to make three purchases on Amazon instead of eBay last week because of the obstacles, writing:
“A lot of users are confused by this. The large purple banner about shopping eBay Live appearing above search results is not only distracting, but it’s causing users to think all the search results are eBay Live listings and not regular search results. Can you send that specific feedback to the product teams, please?
“All the eBay Live modules in the middle of search are also disruptive. I know eBay wants to promote this, but it’s turning off shoppers. Even I have been turned off by this and abandoned 3 different items I was going to purchase on eBay this week and I bought them on Amazon instead where I didn’t have so many obstacles in search. There’s too much eBay Live getting in the way of regular shopping.
“You’ve probably seen the numerous other problems like flooding the notifications page on the app with unwanted eBay Live notifications even though push notifications are turned off, the entire home page on both app and web being filled with nothing but eBay Live, and hundreds of complaints on all social forums about this. Lots of people upset and leaving eBay after opening up their app or browser to be inundated with eBay Live.”
Some people also blamed the marketing of the eBay Live sales event for a search outage that occurred on Monday afternoon, prior to the sale itself. While there’s nothing to confirm that, it does indicate that people may be sensitive to the attention eBay is giving to a platform in which a majority of sellers aren’t eligible to participate.
