While many shoppers think of sites like Facebook Marketplace for local pickup, eBay also offers sellers the ability to bypass shipping and let buyers come and pick up their purchase in person. In an announcement on Wednesday titled, “Faster and Local Shopping on eBay Just Got Simpler,” eBay said it had made several UX (user experience) enhancements to help customers find local listings and fast-shipping items.
In search results, eBay now displays precise distance values on listings that offer local pickup between the buyer and the item’s location, so buyers know the driving distance prior to making a purchase decision.
eBay also now offers a “Shipping and pickup” filter, which consolidates all delivery options including Free shipping, Local pickup, and Click & Collect (a UK offering) into a single filter.
eBay offers guidance to sellers on offering local pickup in its help pages where it says sellers can offer local pickup exclusively or can add it to their other shipping options. Sellers are also required to offer buyers at least one approved electronic payment method, but sellers may also add a “pay on pickup” option.
eBay requires tracking numbers to prove sellers sent their shipped orders, which clearly wouldn’t work for items picked up locally. For those orders, eBay creates a code that buyers provide to sellers upon pickup – either a QR code or a six-digit code. As long as sellers enter the code into the eBay app, they will be covered for Item Not Received claims. (Unfortunately, sellers with old devices can no longer use the eBay mobile app, EcommerceBytes reported last month.)
But local selling on eBay hasn’t yet caught on in a major way, and sellers still continue to have questions about local pickup. On a thread on Friday, a seller looked for help, explaining: “Buyer chose to pick up instead of my shipping the item. How does she let eBay know that she has the item. She’s left positive feedback. My payment is on hold until she states item has arrived. Thank you!”
Sellers responded to the original poster and said sellers should not allow local pickup unless they offered it on their listings. One replied with the following advice:
“If this should happen again the way to handle it is to cancel the sale using problem with buyer’s address and relist the item with the correct shipping method for them to repurchase. With local pick up the buyer receives a QR code and a digit code that the seller enters into the eBay APP as proof of delivery.”
It’s worth noting that eBay is currently testing having its listings appear on Facebook Marketplace (Last week, eBay CEO Jamie Iannone called it early days when speaking to Wall Street analysts and said eBay was gradually scaling up the test).
eBay promised to share information about the integration with Facebook during Friday’s Seller Check-in on March 7, 2025.