eBay announced its September Seller Update for 2026, including new features sellers have already encountered. eBay described the changes by placing them into three buckets: Grow your business; Trust and protection; and Optimize your business. In the first bucket was the new eBay Bundle Discounts feature; notably, a former eBay executive turned seller discussed its pros and cons in a YouTube video.
The new eBay Bundle Discounts help page states: “Bundle discounts let you offer a percentage off when a buyer purchases multiple items from you in one order. You choose the discount tiers and which items are included.”
eBay explained that when a seller sets up the bundle discount feature, buyers see the discounts while browsing a listing and in the seller’s store and profile. “The bundle discount prompts will show the percentage discounts you offer. The cash amount the buyer pays will be clear at checkout. You don’t need to do anything to calculate the discount or confirm it’s applied.”
Sellers should be aware of the following: “If you are opted in to bundle discounts, any new eligible listings you create will automatically be added to your bundle discount inventory. You can exclude individual listings at any time if you don’t want them to be eligible for bundle discounts.”
Sellers may be wondering what happens if a buyer returns one of the items they purchased as part of a bundle. eBay said it recalculates the price based on the items they keep: “If a buyer returns some items, the kept items are re-priced at the discount tier they qualify for based on remaining quantity. If they no longer meet a tier minimum, they revert to full price. The buyer’s refund is calculated accordingly. You don’t need to manage this manually.”
The point of bundle discounts is to incentivize buyers to purchase more than one item in a single order, so eBay made a point of explaining that buyers do see the discounts prior to reaching checkout. “Bundle discount opportunities are surfaced to buyers on your listing pages, in their cart, and on your store or profile page. They’ll see the discount percentage and the cash amount they’ll pay as they add items, before they pay.”
What about combined shipping? eBay explained, “shipping is managed separately and is based on the shipping options in your listings. To make bundle discounts even more attractive to buyers, you can offer free shipping or set up combined shipping discounts through your shipping preferences.”
Note that eBay also has a Discounts Manager feature (for Stores only), which it describes as follows:
You can set up five different types of special offers using Discounts Manager:
- Sale events: Reduce prices for selected items or categories
- Volume pricing: Offer tiered discounts to buyers who purchase multiple quantities of a single item
- Coupons: Offer exclusive discounts to buyers by using a coded coupon
- Shipping discounts: Offer free shipping for a limited period or under certain conditions
- Order discounts: Offer discounts based on order size or the amount spent by a buyer. You can also create discounts such as a percentage off an additional item or a buy-one-get-one-free offer
A seller who wrote about the new bundle discount feature on Reddit described a major issue, and a reason sellers may wish to omit certain items when using the feature: “Has anyone had success with “bundle discount”? It is store-wide. That doesn’t make sense to me. If, for example, the store has expensive electronics and collectible coins, someone can combine $200 with two $1 coins and get say 3x %15 discount.”
The seller went on to say, “it would be beneficial if different bundles could be created, such as movies, books, electronics, etc; plus complications on returning one item from the bundle and adjusting for discount doesn’t seem worth it. Does anyone use the store-wide bundle discount, and have you had success?”
eBay discussed the new feature during its Holiday Selling Strategies webinar last month, where it said, “You can exclude up to a hundred items. Today, you have to pick them individually. We might improve that later with categories, but right now you can exclude certain items if they don’t fit the bundles.”
eBay seller Commonwealth Picker encountered the new bundle feature last month and posted the following video on YouTube on August 1st. He identified questions about the new feature (“Does it stack with coupons, markdown sales, promoted listings, best offers, whether buyers minutes, see a prominent bundle and save banner in each search result or only after adding items to their cart? Those details will determine how impactful the future really is for sure. So, all this is yet to be seen.”); and he invited former eBay executive and current eBay seller Chuck Van Pelt to discuss bundle discounts (at minute 25:09):
Van Pelt said there were certain items and categories of items he sells that he would not want to include in the bundle discount feature and said the tools for excluding items from the bundle discount feature were not very robust at this point (August 1st). “I don’t want to give the same tiers of discounts on a $10 CD that I do on a $300 camera.” But he called it “very early” in the evolution of the feature and expects eBay to add more functionality in the future.
Van Pelt pointed out another concern he had as a seller: “I can’t help noticing that also in that in that buying flow and in that checkout flow, there are a lot of places where eBay also shows my competitor’s items,” and adding, “It would seem at least at first glance that sponsored listings may be devaluing the benefit the sellers would get from bundles if they see all this other stuff there.”
Details of the new September Seller Update are found in eBay Seller Central.
