eBay made recent changes to Stores, including testing a new “curated” section that appears in some eBay Stores, and changing how sellers’ Promoted Store ads are budgeted so eBay can “leverage machine learning and traffic signals” to optimize sellers’ advertising budgets.
Promoted Stores, as eBay defines it, “is an advertising solution that allows you to easily launch ads in high visibility placements and attract interested buyers to your eBay store. These ads will highlight a coupon or category of items in your store, along with your store’s name, logo, and several of your top performing listings. Promoted Stores can help drive traffic to your store and increase the awareness of your brand on eBay.”
eBay moved Promoted Store ads to monthly budget pacing after having moved its cost-per-click Priority ad campaigns to budget pacing earlier this year. As we explained at the time, eBay may exceed a seller’s target daily budget on some days, up to double the highest target daily budget in effect on that day, but balances that by spending less on other days to ensure the monthly budget limit is not exceeded over the course of the entire month.
eBay explained the change to budget pacing for Promoted Stores as follows: “Beginning October 28th, 2025, Promoted Stores campaigns will transition from daily to monthly budget averaging. This means your campaigns will optimize spending over a calendar month, without exceeding 30.4 times your target daily budget. No action is needed on your part. On October 28th, 2025, your Promoted Stores campaigns will automatically begin using a monthly budget pacing window, utilizing your current daily budget as a target daily budget. Read our budget pacing blog post to find out more.”
On an announcement post on the now defunct eBay Advertising blog, eBay described in more detail what was changing and included FAQs for sellers.
eBay made another change, this one impacting Stores as opposed to Promoted Stores ads. It may be testing the feature since it didn’t announce the change and only some sellers are seeing it. eBay user Wastingtime101, who frequently answers sellers’ questions on the discussion boards and is an expert on eBay shipping, noticed a new “Curated finds for you” section in some sellers’ eBay Stores.
Wastingtime101 posted the following in a thread and added screenshots to show what the new section looked like:
“View at least 2 items from a seller, then visit their Store page, and at the top (below the banner & navigation, above seller’s customized storefront like featured categories, etc, eBay is adding their own row of listings. System pulls out items related to what you viewed and sticks them in that row so buyers see more items in line with what they were viewing.”
They said, “Viewing at least 2 items from the same seller is the magic number to make curated finds appear.” But they noted that they believed the system was “looking at whether that store has any listings similar to items I’ve recently viewed,” which was why it didn’t appear in all of the Stores that Wastingtime101 tested.
It seems likely eBay is using “machine learning and traffic signals” in the Curated section of Stores to show shoppers what eBay thinks they may be more likely to buy.
Sellers may be more receptive to the new feature if eBay only shows a Store’s own listings. But some feared eBay would use it to show other sellers’ listings, including other sellers’ Promoted Ad listings. In the first reply in the thread, shared such concerns, writing in part:
“On the one hand, I can see this being a good thing. On the other hand, I can see this being the first step in ebay putting rows of OTHER sellers’ merchandise in our store fronts —-which, let’s face it, are pretty much the last place left without ads. I had hoped ebay would treat our store fronts as sort of sacred in that regard, but ….. as I say…I wouldn’t be surprised to discover this is the first step. And nor would I be surprised if ebay added ads to our stores in Q4….
“I’m probably overreacting, but with the recent change to ad attribution, nothing would surprise me very much anymore…”
If you spot the new Curated Finds feature in eBay Stores, let us know how effective it was and if you see benefits or challenges with the new feature.
