Two journalists writing a small trade blog out of their house in Natick just secured a $55.7 million settlement from eBay and three former executives, with no confidentiality clause attached. $48.7 million of it goes to them; the rest is charitable contributions.
They did that because they kept reporting while people were sending them cockroaches and a book about surviving the death of a spouse.
If that doesn’t reset your sense of what’s possible when someone keeps a record, nothing will.
This is the last piece of the series on reducing what eBay takes from you, and it’s the least commercial. Nothing here saves you money this month. It’s the one that changes the field over years.
First: what doesn’t work
I’ll be blunt, because people burn a lot of energy here.
Posting in Facebook groups. Feels great. Reaches other sellers. Reaches nobody with authority.
“I’m leaving eBay” announcements. eBay does not notice individual sellers leaving and you usually come back, which just costs you sales and dignity.
Yelling at customer service reps. The person on chat has no power over policy and is having a worse day than you.
Leaving one-star app reviews. Genuinely nothing.
None of that creates a record. Records are the only thing that has ever moved a company this size.
What actually creates a record
1. The FTC
The Federal Trade Commission takes complaints about unfair and deceptive business practices at reportfraud.ftc.gov. Individual complaints don’t trigger individual investigations – but they aggregate, and pattern volume in a category is exactly what prompts staff to look.
File when you have something concrete: a fee charged that contradicts the published fee schedule, an advertising product whose disclosures don’t match its behavior, a policy applied retroactively, money held without explanation, a return claim decided against you with no evidence reviewed.
Be specific. Dates, dollar amounts, screenshots, order numbers. “eBay is greedy” is noise. “On June 3 I was charged X under fee schedule Y which states Z” is signal.
2. Your state Attorney General
This one is underrated because it’s local and the volume is far lower, so yours actually gets read. Many state AGs have a consumer protection division with an online complaint form that accepts small business complaints. Check your state’s form first though – some consumer protection statutes only cover personal, family or household transactions.
State AGs have real power – they bring actions, they join multistate investigations, and companies respond to them in a way they don’t respond to you.
3. Shareholder and governance pressure
eBay is publicly traded. If you own shares, even a few, you can vote proxies and submit questions.
This is the pressure point the cyberstalking case exposed most clearly. Independent reporting has raised sustained questions about eBay’s board oversight during the harassment campaign, executive sabbaticals while it was underway, severance that was never clawed back, and scandal-era directors still holding board leadership roles. Those are governance questions, and governance questions are the language institutional investors speak.
4. Support the journalism
This is the one I’d actually ask you to do.
The Steiners got there because EcommerceBytes existed and kept publishing. Independent marketplace journalism is a handful of people doing work no mainstream outlet covers. Value Added Resource, written by Liz Morton, is ad-free and subscriber-funded, and broke most of the detail in this series. EcommerceBytes has covered this beat since 1999 and is free to read.
Subscribe. Share their reporting. When a policy change hits, send them documentation. A trade press that can’t afford to keep going is exactly what a company hoping nobody notices would prefer.
5. Be a documented seller
Boring but foundational. Screenshot policy pages before they change. Save fee schedules. Keep your transaction reports. Note the date and time when a rate changes with a day’s notice.
When enough sellers have receipts, patterns become provable. When nobody does, it’s all just vibes and the company wins by default.
Doing this without getting hurt
Real talk, since I’m the one suggesting it.
Don’t violate the user agreement to make a point. Off-platform transactions, coordinated review campaigns, telling buyers to contact you outside eBay – those get you suspended and cost you the income you were trying to protect.
Diversify first, speak second. This is the actual answer. A seller whose income is spread across five marketplaces and their own store can afford to be honest publicly. A seller whose entire livelihood is one account cannot, and shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Spreading your income is not just a business decision, it’s what buys you the freedom to have an opinion.
Use your real experience, not rumors. Your own documented case is worth more than repeating something you saw in a group.
Stay factual. Facts are more damaging than adjectives, and they can’t be used against you.
The quiet version
If none of the above is for you, there’s a version that requires nothing but arithmetic: stop paying for the optional stuff.
Buy your labels elsewhere. Turn off the ads that aren’t earning. Right-size the subscription. Cancel the add-ons. Keep selling, keep the money.
Companies notice revenue per seller falling long before they notice a complaint thread.
Bottom line
You don’t have to choose between paying your bills and having a spine. Diversify so you can afford to be honest, document everything, file where it creates a record, and fund the people whose job is finding out what happened.
Two people with a blog and good records secured a $55.7 million settlement and a public statement from a company that tried to terrify them into silence. That’s the precedent. Keep the receipts.
If you want the automation stack that makes multi-channel selling realistic enough to give you that freedom, it’s in the AI Reselling Playbook.
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