eBay announced its 2025 Winter Seller Update on Thursday that includes a new buyer portal for sellers along with higher selling fees. As usual, eBay put the Seller Update news into categories, in this case, the following three buckets:
Tools you can trust: Provide your buyers with a clearer understanding of your item’s condition with our new, detailed condition options for pre-loved clothing. Plus, streamline how you manage your listings with the redesigned business policies page.
Grow your business: Use the new buyer details feature to identify your returning customers and easily send them coupons to encourage future purchases.
Fees and financials: We’re adjusting final value fees in most categories so we can continue our ongoing efforts to provide tools and services in support of your long-term growth.
The biggest impact for sellers is the higher fees, which we wrote about in Thursday’s EcommerceBytes Blog post. eBay wrote in part:
“We’ll be adjusting final value fees in most categories starting February 14, 2025, with increases ranging up to a maximum of 0.35%. We remain committed to offering competitive fees that reflect the value you receive from selling on eBay.”
But an alert reader commented on the EcommerceBytes Blog:
“An increase from 12.35% to 12.7% is not “up to a maximum of 0.35%.” This is by no means the first time eBay has made this type of error, and it’s mind boggling that the legal team continues to miss this. It’s an increase of 35 basis points, but in percentage, it actually comes out to over 2.8%.”
We did a little math ourselves. The commission for “most categories” (eBay’s words) for sellers without a Store is currently 13.25% for items under $7,500. That fee will rise to 13.6% on February 14th.
That seller would currently pay $3.98 for an item that sells for $30 inclusive of shipping and taxes. In 2 weeks, the seller would pay $4.08 for that same item. That’s an increase of 2.51%, a far cry from the 0.35% eBay word-smithed the fee change.
One of the Seller Update changes appears to have a more positive impact on sellers – “Easily identify and engage with repeat customers using our new buyer details feature.” eBay explained the change in a post on the discussion board where sellers are leaving comments.