Reselling News: eBay Opens Bundle Discounts to Every Seller and EcommerceBytes Closes After 27 Years

Two things landed this week and they pull in opposite directions. One hands you a pricing lever eleven weeks out from Christmas. The other quietly removes a place sellers have gone for answers since before most of us had an account.

eBay opened bundle discounts to every seller

Bundle discounts let you take a percentage off when one buyer takes more than one item from you in a single order. You set the tiers yourself, and eBay's seller help page describes them as applying to "purchases of 2, 3 or more of the same item or a mix and match of items." The feature rolled out in stages during August. Value Added Resource noted in its September seller news roundup that access has now expanded to all sellers ahead of the holiday season.

One sentence on that help page decides whether this ends up a tool or a leak. eBay says bundle discounts "require you to opt in. They are not turned on by default." But the moment you do opt in, the default flips. From the same page: "If you are opted in to bundle discounts, any new eligible listings you create will automatically be added to your bundle discount inventory." You turn it on once, and everything you list from then on joins unless you go back and exclude that listing by hand.

Two more mechanics matter. Bundles stack with eBay sitewide promotions and sale events, but not with your own coupons, order discounts, volume pricing, or promo codes, and when both exist the coupon wins. eBay's own example is a 15 percent bundle sitting next to a 20 percent coupon, where the buyer gets the 20. And on a partial return, "the kept items are re-priced at the discount tier they qualify for based on remaining quantity," so a buyer who keeps one of three drops back to full price automatically.

Your move: decide this by closet type, not by fear of missing the holiday. If you sell one-off hard goods, nobody is buying two, and the tiers do nothing but sit there. If you sell clothing with any depth, where a buyer who likes one tee will take three, this is the cheapest way to raise an order total you already have. Just price the discount in before you flip the switch, because it comes off items you priced against sold comps, and remember that everything you list afterward joins on its own.

EcommerceBytes stopped publishing after 27 years

The site that covered marketplace sellers longer than most marketplaces have existed is gone. Its homepage now reads, "After 27 years, EcommerceBytes has ceased publication." David and Ina Steiner launched it as AuctionBytes in 1999 and renamed it in 2011, and the farewell notice thanks the "freelance reporters, advertisers, and providers" who supported what it calls a small, husband and wife publishing business. No reason is given.

The practical loss is bigger than the masthead. Value Added Resource reported on September 14 that older article and blog links no longer return the original content, and the farewell notice says nothing about whether the archive comes back.

Your move: go look at your own bookmarks. If your understanding of a fee, a policy, or a category rule rests on an article rather than on the platform's page, that link may already be dead. Save the primary source instead, meaning eBay's help article, the USPS newsroom release, the Poshmark blog post. The coverage explains it, but only the platform's own page is the thing you can point at when a case goes sideways.

The takeaway

Both stories say the same quiet thing about running this as a business. Verify the rule at the source, then choose the setting on purpose rather than letting a default choose for you. Working out which levers actually fit the closet you have is the part we go through together inside The Income Lab.

Hero image: a shopper filling a basket in a home goods store, photographed by Nenad Stojkovic, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.