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Your eBay Community Team
@thealuminiumshop wrote:
Hi Dave,
Thanks for the reply — but to be perfectly honest, this update is extremely disheartening.
We've worked hard to scale multi-variation listings with up to 250 variations, carefully managing our bidding and performance on a variation level. With the new attribution changes, it appears any promoted click on a single variation now locks all 250 variations into the promoted fee — regardless of whether those variations had impressions, visibility, or sales influenced by the ad.
This fundamentally breaks fair attribution and penalises sellers who use eBay's own listing tools to offer choice and efficiency to buyers.
A few urgent questions I need answered:
1. Where is the transparency?
Why hasn’t eBay officially communicated this in a detailed way, especially given how significantly it impacts high-variation sellers? A few lines in a community thread is not adequate.
2. Where is the data?
Can the Ads team provide evidence that multiple variation listings receive truly shared visibility from a single promoted click? Or are we simply being charged promoted fees across the board without actual ad delivery?
3. How does this benefit sellers — at all?
Sellers are now incentivised to break out variations into dozens of single-item listings, which clutters the marketplace and creates a worse experience for buyers. Is this really the direction eBay wants?
4. Will we get control back?
Will there be a future feature allowing variation-level ad attribution and bidding — especially for large catalogues where margin varies dramatically by variation?
5. Who advocates for high-volume sellers when these changes are made?
We can't escalate while "the person who knows is out of office" for 4 weeks. That’s not a system. We need accountability, not silence.
To say this is frustrating is an understatement. We need real answers and representation before more sellers abandon multi-variation listings or reduce promoted listings entirely.
Looking forward to a proper response — not vague assurances.
Hi @thealuminiumshop ,
As I'm on the Ads team I unfortunately don't have the answers to your questions. I'll pass your questions over to the Ads Team but I can't guarantee a response that I can publicly share.
If they come back with some information that I can share, I'll post it.
Thanks,
Dave
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@vinylscot wrote:
marco@ebay With respect, with regard to business sellers masquerading as private sellers, many of us have been reporting these regularly for months, if not years, and, in my own experience, action is taken in only around 20% of reports I have submitted.
You visit Seller Central and the Business Sellers' Board regularly, and you know how hot a topic this is, and has been for years.
eBay is clearly not taking the action they should be, and is overcharging (possibly illegally, as the sellers are trading illegally) every single buyer from these bogus sellers, on every single transaction. There should be no BPF on any of these sales, as you will no doubt appreciate.
Apart from anything else, eBay must be losing a fortune in uncollected fees.
You (eBay that is, not you personally) really need to sort this out.
Hi vinylscot, thanks for your input on this.
I totally see where you are coming from, but like you said above, it is within our best interest as a company to make sure that sellers a correctly registered, with one of the reasons being that, for example in this case, it could cost us profit in fees, so that with other reasons, makes us definitely review and actions these reports accordingly. However, we are unable to share the outcomes of these reviews for the reasons I've mentioned above. So, we can only encourage users to keep reporting anything that they believe might be against policy.
Thank you,
Marco
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@krafty-kreations wrote:
I have no clue why they aren't there
I have tried to edit under communication with buyers but I cannot add or edit anything in there.
Thanks for your reply, krafty-kreations.
I checked there and I couldn't see anything, so that would make me believe that they were deleted. If you still see it, can you give an item number, and if you want send me a screenshot and I'll take a further look for you.
Thank you,
Marco
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@krafty-kreations wrote:
Can I please share some honest feedback? It feels like eBay may be losing its way.
In just a few short months, we've seen the introduction of BPF, Simple Delivery, and now this new promotions model—all of which seem primarily focused on generating more revenue for eBay, but at the cost of making things more expensive and difficult for sellers.
I completely understand that eBay is a business and needs to make money. However, it’s disheartening that long-standing issues, like private accounts being used by obvious business sellers to avoid fees, are still not being addressed. Meanwhile, genuine, committed sellers—many of whom are also loyal buyers—are being pushed away by these changes.
You can only keep taking so much before people simply walk away. I truly hope eBay listens to its seller community before more of us feel forced to do just that.
I understand your frustration at some of the changes we have introduced. We have been documenting and passing back all the feedback we received to the teams responsible for the updates.
I will of course share this with leadership as part of the report on this chat.
Thanks,
Dave
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