Most of us have a complicated relationship with eBay. It pays bills. It moves inventory nothing else will move. And every so often it does something that makes you wonder what kind of company you’ve hitched your income to.<\/p>\n\n
Monday was one of those times.<\/p>\n\n
In 2019, Ina and David Steiner ran a small trade publication called EcommerceBytes out of their house in Natick, Massachusetts. They covered eBay. Sometimes critically. An anonymous commenter on their site got under executives’ skin too.<\/p>\n\n
So eBay employees went after them. Not with lawyers. With this:<\/p>\n\n
That is not a disgruntled-employee story. That is a corporate security team running a terror campaign against two journalists in their own home for writing articles.<\/p>\n\n
Seven former eBay employees and contractors pleaded guilty to criminal charges.<\/strong> Some went to prison. In 2024, eBay itself admitted responsibility for six felony offenses<\/strong> under a deferred prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice, paid a $3 million criminal fine, and agreed to three years of enhanced compliance monitoring.<\/p>\n\n And on July 27, 2026, eBay and several former executives finalized a $55.7 million settlement<\/strong> with the Steiners, six years on from the 2019 campaign. eBay’s own share is $52.15 million; the rest comes from individuals.<\/p>\n\n The Steiners receive $48.7 million in compensation:<\/p>\n\n On top of that, eBay funds $6 million to nonprofits, and Wenig contributes another $1 million to a First Amendment charity in Ina Steiner’s name.<\/p>\n\n An important distinction, and I want to be precise about it.<\/strong> None of those three executives was ever criminally charged. The seven people who pleaded guilty were the security staff and contractors who carried the campaign out. These payments are settlement contributions, not penalties, and the settlement carries no admission of liability by anyone.<\/p>\n\n Two details matter more than the dollar figure.<\/p>\n\n First, there is no confidentiality restriction.<\/strong> The Steiners can keep talking about what happened and what the six years of litigation turned up. Companies pay a premium for silence. They didn’t get it here.<\/p>\n\n Second, eBay issued a public statement<\/strong> rather than staying silent, saying what the Steiners were subjected to by former eBay employees in 2019 was “wrong, reprehensible and should never have happened.”<\/p>\n\n One detail from the filings, and I’ll flag its status carefully. An FBI affidavit attached to the Steiners’ civil complaint alleges that Wenig, after an unflattering Wall Street Journal piece, texted “F— them. The Journal is next on the list after [Ina Steiner].” That is an untested allegation in a case that settled with no finding of liability. Wenig disputes the characterisation, says the messages referred to PR strategy, and has said he was appalled by what happened and would have stopped it had he known. eBay’s own internal investigation concluded he did not direct or know about the criminal acts.<\/p>\n\n Court filings put the damages sought as high as $700 million. The case also nearly settled back in March, fell apart over the written terms, got reopened by Judge Patti Saris in June with a new trial set for January 2027, and then landed here.<\/p>\n\n Here’s where I’ll be honest with you instead of preachy.<\/p>\n\n I’m not going to tell you to delete your eBay account. For a lot of resellers eBay is thirty, fifty, seventy percent of the money, and “quit on principle” is advice from people who don’t have to make rent. Telling a single mom to torch her best sales channel isn’t activism, it’s just expensive.<\/p>\n\n But there is a middle path, and almost nobody talks about it: keep the income, shrink the cut.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n eBay doesn’t only make money when you sell something. They make money on the ad you bought to get the sale. On the store subscription. On the shipping label. On the shipping charge itself, because final value fees are calculated on the total the buyer pays including shipping and tax. Every dollar that flows through their pipes gets a toll.<\/p>\n\n You cannot control the final value fee. You can control almost everything else.<\/p>\n\n Nine ways to do exactly that, each one its own deep dive:<\/p>\n\n 1. Buy your shipping labels somewhere else.<\/a><\/strong> Pirate Ship<\/a> (pirateship.com) is completely free – no subscription, no markup – and gets you the same commercial USPS rates or better, unlocks Priority Mail Cubic pricing that eBay flatly doesn\u2019t offer, and has an eBay integration so your tracking still lands on the order automatically. Just this month eBay gave sellers one day of notice before raising Ground Advantage label rates on 3 to 5 pound packages. That’s the whole argument in one sentence: they adjust your rates, on their schedule.<\/p>\n\n 2. Turn off Promoted Listings, or at least audit them.<\/a><\/strong> Advertising is eBay’s fastest-growing revenue line and it’s close to pure margin for them. Most sellers are paying an ad fee on sales they’d have gotten anyway.<\/p>\n\n 3. Make eBay one channel instead of the channel.<\/a><\/strong> The single biggest lever. When eBay is 100% of your income, their policy changes are your emergencies. When they’re 30%, they’re a Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n 4. Build a store nobody can take away from you.<\/a><\/strong> Set up a Shopify<\/a> store, or Square Online or Big Cartel if you want something cheaper to test with. Your own site, your own email list, and roughly 3% in payment processing instead of a final value fee plus an ad rate calculated on shipping and tax.<\/p>\n\n The fees are the smaller half of it. On your own store there are no item specifics to comply with, no algorithm deciding whether anyone sees you, no policy email landing on a Tuesday, no dispute process written by the other side, and nobody breathing down your neck about how you run your own shop. You set the return policy. You keep the customer. Nobody can switch you off.<\/p>\n\n 5. Do the math on your store subscription.<\/a><\/strong> For some sellers it genuinely pays for itself. For a lot of others it’s a monthly habit nobody’s re-checked in two years.<\/p>\n\n 6. Stop paying for the add-ons.<\/a><\/strong> Listing upgrades, branded supplies, seller financing, optional value-added services. Individually small. Annually not small.<\/p>\n\n 7. Actually push back.<\/a><\/strong> Regulators, state AGs, and independent seller journalism. The Steiners got there because someone kept reporting. That mattered.<\/p>\n\n 8. And be careful with paid visibility everywhere else too.<\/a><\/strong> This isn’t only an eBay habit. Depop sellers are reporting that boosting cost them far more than the fee. Same lesson, different logo.<\/p>\n\n 9. Know how the return rules really work.<\/a><\/strong> On paper a buyer who changed their mind pays return shipping. In practice they tick “not as described”, and you do. Worth understanding before it costs you.<\/p>\n\n Here’s the uncomfortable question underneath all of this: do you even know what eBay took from you last year?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n Most resellers don’t. Not really. The final value fees, the ad fees, the store subscription, the label costs, the international program fees, the promotional credits that expired unused – they’re spread across twelve months of transaction reports nobody wants to open.<\/p>\n\n Spreading your inventory across five marketplaces is a lot more doable than it used to be – a crosslister like Nifty or Vendoo will write and push a listing everywhere at once and pull it down when it sells, which is what makes diversifying realistic instead of exhausting. Pick whichever one suits you.<\/p>\n\n What no crosslister does is sit down with a year of eBay transaction reports and tell you this is what they actually charged you, broken out by fee type, and here is the number you could have kept.<\/em> That reconciliation – reading the raw reports, categorizing every line, and producing one honest total – is the gap.<\/p>\n\n That’s the kind of job I hand to Claude. (Claude is an AI that works like a virtual assistant – it actually controls your computer for you and automates the boring stuff. Use my link and you may qualify for a free week to test it, subject to availability: https:\/\/claude.ai\/referral\/LJhm3qPEVQ<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n I won’t pretend it’s one clever sentence, because the setup is the whole trick. The way I wire it up is in the AI Reselling Playbook<\/a>. And if you just want the tax side handled, my free Schedule C Expense Tracker<\/a> will at least get your fees where they belong.<\/p>\n\n You don’t have to choose between paying your rent and having a spine. You can sell on eBay and still refuse to hand them a dollar more than the transaction requires. Buy your labels elsewhere, kill the ads that aren’t earning, spread your inventory across five marketplaces, and build something with your own name on the door.<\/p>\n\n A company that sent a grieving-widow book to a woman for writing blog posts does not deserve your optional spending. Your shop should work while you sleep – and it should work for you, not for them.<\/p>\n\nThe settlement, in plain numbers<\/h2>\n\n
So what do you do with that?<\/h2>\n\n
The part where AI helps<\/h2>\n\n
Bottom line<\/h2>\n\n