eBay allows sellers to make offers to buyers in a few different ways, and the company said the feature, also known as "Seller Initiated Offers," was a success.

This month, Offer to Buyers reached a huge milestone and surpassed $1 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV) since January 1, 2020, according to Harry Temkin and Parin Jogani in a blog post today.

eBay had already allowed buyers to reach out to sellers with Best Offer when it launched Make Offers to Buyers in 2019.

Sellers have shown tremendous enthusiasm for Offer to Buyers, the eBay pair wrote. "With the popularity of this feature among sellers, ... Read More

eBay failed to disburse sellers' funds today but blamed banks, according to reports from sellers. "Lots of sellers did not get their scheduled payouts yesterday," one reader told us. "I was one of them. They claimed it was my bank declining it. Payout from Etsy came through just fine."

In the past, sellers would receive immediate payment directly from buyers into their PayPal accounts. Under Managed Payments, eBay collects payments and disburses them to sellers, which adds a delay in getting paid.

When scheduled payouts don't come through, that adds a cash-flow burden that sellers of any size can least afford, ... Read More

"I'd like to call your attention to what I think is the largest scale abuse of sellers I've ever witnessed on the platform," an eBay seller wrote us last week. He was talking about penalty fees instituted in 2018 - what eBay refers to as "Additional final value fees" on its policy page.

For those unfamiliar with the fees, eBay charges additional Final Value Fees (commission) when sellers fail to meet performance expectations, including one for having a very high rate of returns for "Item not as Described." eBay charges an additional 5% of the total ... Read More

eBay sued Amazon in 2018 and then filed a RICO lawsuit against three Amazon employees in 2019. This month, Amazon and its employees prevailed, according to The Verge.

RICO is a tactic usually associated with government prosecution of mobsters (RICO stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations), but eBay's civil RICO lawsuit was related to Amazon's alleged recruitment practices of eBay sellers. 

eBay accused the three Amazon managers of engaging in a pattern of racketeering activity - "a conspiracy designed to infiltrate and exploit eBay's internal member email system using fraud and false pretenses when recruiting eBay sellers."

Imagine spending the time carefully crafting a listing on eBay only to have it disappear before posting. That's what some sellers are reporting is happening to their draft listings, including a reader who brought the problem to our attention.

"I've been having trouble with eBay deleting my draft auctions, literally for years," he told us. "Sometimes when I call in they say my drafts should be retained indefinitely, sometimes they say 90 days. In order to try to avoid issues I have been going in every month or so and "refreshing" the save date so they don't go over 90 days."

However, he ... Read More