How many sellers are closing their shops or running down their account in 2024?

[ovleisure]

We have been a seller on here over a couple of our accounts for many years now.   Over this time we have seen a reduction in sales from a max of £13k pcm to £60 pcm.    We have been through mass seller culls, more and more control over the seller/buyer relationship, the forcing of managed payments, increases in fees and requirements to use promoted/advanced promoted and now bid for clicks, to the point where ebay is taking an unsustainable percentage of profit.  

This in turn has lead to such search manipulation as to be virtually impossible for any of our listings to be shown unless we implemented all of the additional promotions, and even then since everyone is in the same boat, it makes little difference.   Search has been broken as a result of all this, and whereas in the past, if your product met the search terms, you could get your item to show, this is now not much short of a miracle!

Maybe you could argue some of it is the economy, but when your listings barely get any visibility unless you pay through the nose for it, it becomes a weak argument at best.

We have closed our shop and have halved our listings, and will be running down all of the stock we do have via other marketplaces.  

I'm just curious what other peoples plans are in 2024, are you bearing with ebay in the hopes of better times, or moving on?

[harmonyfinds]

Spot on!! That's exactly what they do. 🙃

[salen11]

I am trying to clear our house, I am selling about 5% of what I was 2 yrs ago on ebay.

[vintage-vinyl-memorabilia]

Just did it myself at end of 2025. They destroyed canadian subscription value, while increasing fees and now adding additional shipping costs with their international program. 

I had people make ebay accounts for my items and eBay claimed they could collect old promotion rates from before these people even had accounts.  These were on high value limited edition collectibles. They took a lot from just a small home hobby store in a short amount of time. In my eyes its theft but they use their small print legal eaze to turn their "last Click" to "Any Click", so they're cool. 

I could of paid to setup/operate a domain store for years with the extra money they took. 

So I took it all down and did exactly that. 

So yeah they're still driving the value of their service into the ground. 

Will be nothing more than an online pawn shop people use in regret. 

So i 

[thomasoes]

A lot of the buyers are using amazon more as they look after  them and have good delivery.All ebay are bothered about are there china sellers and to many are private sellers with thousands of items sold so that is not fair on business seller

[typo_lee]

Closing our eBay shop in the new year and moving all listings over to our other platform 

[british-ceramics-and-paintings]

Traffic is a third / half of what it was 3 - 5 years ago.

International exposure is non existent.

Fees are way too expensive to operative a viable long term business and the number of businesses trading on private accounts seems to get higher week on week.

Ebay does nothing to support / encourage legitimate long standing business sellers.

[thomasoes]

You can report sellers claiming to be private but nothing is done.A private seller would not have hundreds of new items for sale

Sent from Outlook for Android<>

[binnes2]

I didn’t realise you could report them but as you say , same as anything
reported to eBay , nothing is done. There are private sellers with more
items for sale and way more sales than me

[binnes2]

It’s this having to pay even more for eBay deeming to allow your items to
be VIEWED that’s killing my sales yeah about half of a year a couple of
years ago.

[thomasoes]

It is a wonder the tax man does not look at these private sellers with thousands of sales

Sent from Outlook for Android<>

[555njp]

I think you’ll find most of those trading illegally on private accounts are still declaring profits and paying tax. 

Tax evasion isn’t generally the issue as the legal requirement for all online selling platforms to report sales information directly to HMRC with very low thresholds has that covered, although I’m fairly sure they aren’t resourced to anywhere near a level where they could go after the tax avoiders unless it’s in the several £000’s to make an investigation pay.

So the only rules being broken are trading laws: I.e. making it clear they are trading, denying buyers their legal right of return and hiding business contact details etc. etc.

You can report to eBay but it’s a laborious process and in our experience they do nothing.

Trading Standards are not interested in the least (totally useless IMO) and HMRC don’t care as long as tax isn’t being avoided.

Ebay should be bothered because they are losing business sellers (and associated revenue) hand over fist, the platform is slowly diminishing and if they don’t fix this they might all be out of a job. But if you read the weekly chat sessions, this comes up time and time again but nothing is done.

[messier44000]

My website and in particular you-tube sales is as good as ever. In fact you-tube sales 

are the best they have ever been (you get out what you are prepared to put into it)

Year and half since closing my shop to leave a few PAYG going.

I got no sorry to hear we are losing you emails and zero incentives or requests from eBay to come back.

May consider re-opening the shop and bulk listing. But waiting for eBay to give me a reason to 

do so, or have a price structure that allows sellers to lower prices and buyers to get a good deal.

The savvy buyers are heading elsewhere like my website and public open days.

Unless where in my fantasy world eBay ditch PLs, FDD, and no doubt enforced delivery methods 

for all due at some point, I am sure Google shopping would rather carry on taking my ££s that 

could have been in eBays shareholder pockets.

Last 7 days

eBay £24.95

Website £3.5k including over £1k from you-tube alone

Not rocket science to work out where buyers have gone

[theelench]

So it seems that all the mud flung at private sellers, the newly introduced ways of curtailing their sales by making appear easier and more straight forward to buy from businesses has been for nothing ?

The businesses operating on private accounts still proliferate and undercut those who obey the rules.  So all that ebay has achieved is to lose another swathe private sellers and their buying power because it won't tackle the underlying problem of businesses mis-representing themselves by buying and selling on private accounts.

[rosslee21]

I was showing on ebay as the highest bidder on an item with 4 hrs still to go, but then I noticed a red word ended beside my bid.     But it is still showing highest bidder, only bidder in fact and I decided to submit a higher bid and it wouldn't let me which suggests the seller has ended the listing or taken another bid.  Anyone know when this is happening?

[chrbac.uye5b7]

That sounds like the seller ended the listing early.
When you see your bid with a red word like “Ended” next to it, that means the auction has been terminated, even if the page still temporarily shows you as the highest bidder. eBay’s UI is slow and sometimes keeps the “You’re the highest bidder” banner visible until the page fully refreshes or eBay syncs things on their end.

[punkwroc77]

Not a business Seller but this is the first time in over 20 years selling on Ebay that I have had no sales, and only 1 sale item favourited, in the Month before Christmas. Thank You Ebay (Buyer Fee & Not so Simple delivery). 

[typo_lee]

Well looking at our impressions we are down 60% on same time last year so the buyer fee must be putting people off. My mate who buys off eBay vehicle parts says eBay has gone very expensive now. People have definitely left the platform in droves 

[nelle_stanton]

It's become an AI nightmare with tax on top - I get if you are selling
multiples of same items in a £1k bracket - but many of us just want to sell
a few bits ! eBay just want to be the next Amazon - it really cares not
about us or the environment and the UK government just bundled us up onto a
quagmire of care not less! They have our NI number and can see exactly what
we sell and that's fine so long as you use this wisely 👍 I haven't sold
more than £1 ooo pounds in 10 years so this is totally unnecessary.

[lookinpandorasbox]

I can remember you saying this time last year how sales were booming! I think your feedback for the mast month was around the 300-400 figure.You are not alone in poor sales,its by far the worst christmas I have ever seen.

[typo_lee]

Last year we were doing £260 per day average. Today we have taken a grand total of £3.30. We are finished on here