Is Ebay Pushing "Live" Too Hard? | Business Seller Board

bricklanebargains · 2026-07-09T10:32:16.037763Z

About 6 months ago, I received an email invite from an Ebay customer agent to participate in live auctions which I initially ignored due to workload. Shortly after I started seing adverts for live auctions everywhere on Ebay`s main page. Since the inception of Ebay, the main page was always dedicated to product suggestions based on a users buying history but its mostly about live auctions these days in all kinds of different categories from toys to collectibles, clothing to coins, pokemon cards to watches whether you are interested in those or not. Eventually I sat through a few live auctions in my category which is branded used clothing and would like to share my observations. In the clothing category, for example, most live auctions are organized by large scale sellers who basically want to move their unsold stock with a few designer items placed in between in an effort to attract attention. I noticed that many of the live buyers are resellers themselves who are looking to source items for their own Ebay stores which is great for them of course. Most items go for a few pounds, some of them for way less than what they would normally fetch if listed in the traditional way. This natually comes at the expense of traditional listings and smaller sellers like many of us (you don`t often see the big boys commenting in Ebay seller forums) since Ebay allocates significant site traffic to live. Is Ebay pushing it too hard and wasting site traffic in the process? Are they a bit too worried that they`re left behind Whatnot in that segment and now trying to catch up like they did with Vinted by scrapping fees for private sellers which eventually caused a big mess (businesses disguised as private and all other related issues)? I wonder what everyone is thinking.

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Is Ebay Pushing "Live" Too Hard? | Business Seller Board | eBay UK