Reselling News: eBay Opens Custom Store Ads to Every Store Seller, and ThredUp Goes Live on Whatnot

Two of yesterday's announcements point the same direction. The marketplaces are handing sellers more advertising dials right as the biggest resale companies start crowding into live selling.

eBay opened custom Store ads to every Store subscriber

eBay announced on September 29 that Promoted Stores Custom is now available to every eligible seller with an active Store subscription. It had been limited to a smaller test group. It now sits in the Advertising tab of Seller Hub, and you pick Custom during campaign setup.

Custom takes over two decisions that a standard Promoted Stores campaign makes for you. You select up to 1,000 listings for the campaign and up to ten featured listings that actually show inside the ad, and you choose where the click lands. That landing page can be your Store, a sale event, a curated collection, an eBay Live show, or an Ambassador influencer page. Value Added Resource notes that the Live and influencer destinations are the new part of this rollout.

Read the fee model before you get excited. Promoted Stores is cost per click, so you pay for the visit whether or not anything sells. That is a different animal from Promoted Listings Standard, where the fee comes out of a sale that already happened.

If you cannot name the ten items that make a stranger want to look at the rest of your closet, this tool is not for you yet. If you can, pointing that ad at a curated collection instead of a raw Store front is the one change most likely to pay for the clicks.

ThredUp is now running live shows on Whatnot

ThredUp said on September 29 that it has begun hosting live shopping shows on Whatnot, broadcasting out of its distribution centers in Atlanta and Dallas, with the first show that same afternoon. The company also said it is exploring ways to hand Whatnot fashion sellers access to ThredUp inventory and curation data.

That second half is the part worth watching. A processing operation with millions of items just walked onto the platform where individual clothing sellers built their audience, and it is openly talking about supplying those sellers too.

It lands weeks after Whatnot rebuilt its fee structure. As Value Added Resource reported, commission is now tiered off four weeks of sales: 8 percent standard under 15,000 dollars, falling toward 4.5 percent for fashion at 500,000 dollars and up, with negotiated rates as low as 3 percent above that. Payment processing stays separate at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents. The Premier Shop 10 percent commission discount ends October 31.

For a normal reseller none of those lower tiers are reachable, so the honest read is that your rate is 8 percent and your October 31 discount is going away. Price the next few shows against 8 percent plus processing, not against what you paid in August.

An old eBay dispute came back as a federal case

Anson Tse, who worked in eBay Motors from 2007 to 2015, filed suit against eBay on September 25 in the Northern District of California under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, after taking the case through the Department of Labor first. The complaint alleges that an outside consultant's own eBay business received special pricing, fee waivers and directed sourcing, that acquisition metrics were manipulated before they reached the board, and that Tse was retaliated against for raising it.

None of that is proven. It is a complaint, and eBay has not answered it publicly.

The useful takeaway is smaller than the headline. A decade-old dispute over one Motors account is not evidence that the algorithm is against you this week. Sellers lose real hours to that theory, and those hours were supposed to go into listing.

Three stories, one common thread: the cost of selling keeps moving, and it moves in places most sellers never check. Knowing which fee applies before you list, and what a click is actually worth, is the difference between a busy month and a profitable one. That system is what we build inside The Income Lab.

Hero photo by FoothillWebDesign, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.