We recently had the opportunity to attend eBay Open 2025 and it was a really great experience, so we’re going to share what we learned from the event. This was our first eBay Open ever and we were actually invited to speak during the event.
What We Learned About eBay
In the past, we’ve primarily dealt with eBay’s customer service team. We’ve never interacted with the North America employees at eBay and this was a really cool experience. A lot of the employees had been working for eBay for 5, 10, 15 years. Our overall impression was that eBay is a really solid company.
You can tell a lot about how an organization puts on a conference. eBay really went all out. They invested into the event, which shows you the health of the company. You want them to be a healthy company so they can support us as sellers.
The CEO was up on stage the first night sharing where eBay is going. All of the employees were all really amazing to talk to. When they asked us to speak, they covered our airfare and hotel. We had so much fun and got to meet some cool people who shared their niches and stories.
One thing we learned about was that eBay gives out $10,000 grants to people who are trying to get more inventory. They give out 50 of these grants, so it could definitely be something to look into for your reselling business!
Speaking At eBay Open
We’ve spoken a handful of times now on stage at various conferences, maybe five times. eBay Open’s format was they had a big room for some of the pieces and they had breakout rooms for the workshops. We got to do our presentation twice.
The eBay Open conference probably had 400 people in the room during our presentation. We had a lot of fun and Melissa and I knew how to work off of each other well. They did a livestream to open mic, which allowed anyone to ask any question. When you let people do Q&A, you don’t know what questions will be asked, so eBay had a lot of faith in the presenters to be able to give them 15 minutes for questions.
Our video is posted on YouTube if you want to watch the full video. We’ll also be sharing pieces on social media in the next couple of weeks.
eBay Messaging & Listing Updates
eBay announced several updates that we wanted to share with other resellers. They announced the AI assistant for messaging, which will be helpful for resellers that sell in bulk. Basically when somebody sells you a message asking questions about your item, AI can generate a response for you to send. You still get to review it and send it, but it will help answer those generic questions that come through when the information is in the listing and people just missed it. The goal of this is to help save your time so you don’t have to create new responses to redundant questions. We recommend always reviewing anything AI is putting out, don’t just publish it.
Another change is allowing offers in messages. Instead of messaging back and forth and then having to go accept an offer outside of messaging, it can all happen in that same place.
If you’re a high volume seller, this next one could be helpful for your books. They announced that you will be able to put in the cost of goods for an item when you list it. The buyer won’t see it, but you can input that for your own records. That’s helpful for tracking your profit on items.
eBay Inventory Mapping
Inventory mapping is one we didn’t dive too much into, but it could be helpful for high volume sellers. It’s supposed to take your SKUs and help you map out where they are in your warehouse. If you’re a high volume seller, it could help you systemize your items. This probably wouldn’t work too well for what we do, since it’s hard to lose an oven, but it would help when we sell smalls.
eBay Response To Lost Items
If a buyer doesn’t receive an item because it gets lost somewhere in USPS, FedEx, or UPS, eBay’s going to cover it. This doesn’t really affect us or our community because we already get insurance on everything, which means we already get this covered. This will be helpful for folks who don’t get extra insurance on things. It would also make it so you don’t have to go through hoops to get refunds. If they refund it, then you don’t have to go and try to fight with FedEx or fight with USPS. For that, you do have to create the shipping label through eBay, you couldn’t use a third party shipping company like PirateShip.
eBay Feedback Updates
One of the challenging things about eBay is building your feedback. People are busy and don’t always leave reviews. In September, they’re rolling out automated feedback. If the item is delivered, there are no issues, and the buyer hasn’t said anything, they’ll give you a positive feedback automatically.
If somebody does leave feedback later, eBay will remove the automated feedback. It will show the ones that are automated versus not automated.
Those were the main updates we learned about. There was one about open banking for getting financing, but if you are trying to grow your business, I’d recommend applying to eBay’s grants.
Every company has their issues, but our overall impression of eBay was a good one. Our badge had a QR code we could scan to answer questions like, “What can we do better? What is working? What is not working?” and we could leave feedback. eBay Open was great and we will definitely be back again!
Show Notes
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