Several eBay shoppers complained the site slowed to a crawl this week due to ad blocker software installed on their devices, which many people use to stop annoying ads and pop-ups. A frequent commentor on eBay had some advice on how to speed things back up.
On Thursday, a shopper said eBay was “unusable” with AdBlockPlus turned on. A second person confirmed they were experiencing the same issue.
The frequent commentor replied, “If disabling your ad blocker speeds things up, try disabling just the Anti-Circumvention filter in Ad Block, or the ABP filters in Ad Block Plus, or the equivalent filters in other ad blockers.”
“Those filters have been associated with search results loading slowly and heavy resource usage in the past,” they added and provided the following instructions:
“Try disabling just your ABP filters — click in the Ad Block Plus icon in your browser address bar, then on the gear icon to view your settings. Choose “Advanced”, scroll down to “Filters” and click on the toggle under Status by the ABP filter line at the top to disable just those filters. That should allow you to keep blocking most ads and also load eBay search results without slowing down.”
A third person experiencing the same issue said disabling the ABP filters worked perfectly and thanked the user who provided the workaround.
Another two people described the same slowdown on eBay due to ad blocking software in a separate discussion board thread.
Sellers have reported that ad blockers periodically treat eBay Promoted Listings as ads, an issue that seems to generally get resolved.
But slowing down the site to a crawl is far worse, since shoppers may give up visiting eBay. It’s not clear why the issue arose this week, but hopefully the issue will be resolved, since not everyone will become aware of how to turn off certain filters in their ad blocker.
Guess that explains why ebay pages, actually photos, don’t load or load very slowly. Question is, why did it just start 2 days ago for me?
THANK YOU for posting this!! I was losing my mind with eBay and how awful slow it hsz been for a couple days. This fixed me right up!
Slow loading ads are part of the problem. Leaving multiple tabs open may also slow browsers. Microsoft Edge may have a memory leak. This can be observed by opening Task Manager and watching memory and CPU usage. Ebay claims that they prefer Google Chrome, suggesting that their website may not be tested for incompatibilities with other major browsers. It also suggests that eBay is not keeping up with current HTML standards. Ebay should banish ads incompatible with efficient search or effective selling.
I’ve used uBlock Origin and Ghostery for years to prevent ads or unnecessary third-party tracking cookies. eBay webpages always load quickly with minimal clutter. uBlock Origin filters are constantly updated to reflect the latest eBay coding and page layout changes.
I suspect this might be an AdBlock Plus issue as it’s not as efficient as uBlock Origin or some other community-supported ad blocking software (freely available on github).
You have to remember, eBay would rather show you an ad for an offsite sale than for you to buy something on their platform. Just ask the CEO.