Reselling News: The FTC Says Amazon Secretly Marked Up Seller Ad Bids, and eBay Opens Bundle Discounts to Everyone

Two stories landed this week about the same thing: what it costs to get in front of a buyer. One is a federal lawsuit about a bill nobody could see. The other is a free tool eBay just handed every seller on the site.

The FTC says Amazon quietly charged advertisers more than the auction called for

On Monday, August 31, the Federal Trade Commission and 22 state attorneys general sued Amazon over how it prices ads on its own marketplace. The complaint alleges that Amazon told advertisers it ran a second-price auction, where the winner pays a cent more than the next highest bid, while running something else underneath it.

According to the complaint, Amazon added what internal documents called a soft reserve price, calculated after the auction had already picked a winner and a competitive price. If that reserve came in higher, the advertiser paid the reserve instead. Value Added Resource's breakdown notes that internal names for the mechanism included a "surchargedSecondPrice" and an "invented auction participant," and that the practice began with Sponsored Brands in 2018 before reaching Sponsored Products and Display. The regulators put the take at more than 20 billion dollars across roughly 1.2 million advertising customers, more than 500,000 of them small and medium businesses. The number that should get a seller's attention is the drift: the complaint says Sponsored Products advertisers were charged their own full winning bid around 80 percent of the time by 2024, up from 30 to 40 percent in 2021.

Amazon calls the case misguided and says it misunderstands how advertisers operate, that no advertiser ever pays more than the maximum bid they set, and that relevance work saved advertisers 8 billion dollars between 2021 and 2025. TechCrunch has the company's full response. Nothing here is proven yet, and a complaint is one side of an argument.

What to do about it: stop trusting the mechanic and start trusting your own report. Whatever a platform says about how bids clear, the only number that pays your rent is ad spend divided by sales attributed to those ads, checked monthly on your account, in your categories. That applies to eBay Promoted Listings and Poshmark promoted closets exactly as much as it applies to Amazon. If you have never once lowered an ad rate to see whether sales actually fell, you do not know what your ads are doing.

eBay opened bundle discounts to every seller

The phased rollout is over. eBay opened bundle discounts to all sellers the week of August 23, so if the setting was greyed out for you earlier this month, go look again in Seller Hub promotions.

The tool takes an automatic percentage off when a buyer puts more than one of your items in a single order, with separate tiers you set at two items, three items, and four or more. Two details matter. Turning it on enrolls your whole eligible catalog by default, and new listings join automatically, with room to exclude up to 100 individual listings. And it does not combine with coupons, order discounts, volume pricing, or promo codes, though it does stack with eBay funded sale events. eBay pitched it as a holiday move, citing its own survey finding that 57 percent of shoppers expect to start holiday shopping by October or earlier.

What to do about it: run the shipping math before you pick a percentage. A second item that rides along in the same box costs you almost nothing extra to ship, so a discount that looks like lost margin on paper often nets out ahead once you are buying one label instead of two. If you sell in a category where buyers naturally take more than one thing, this is worth turning on this week rather than in November.

The takeaway

Both items come down to the same discipline. Platforms will keep changing what visibility costs and what a multiple item order is worth, and none of them will tell you what those changes did to your margin. That is on you to measure, and knowing how to read a fee, a bid, or a discount against your real numbers is the difference between a busy shop and a profitable one. We work through that math together inside The Income Lab.

Hero photo by Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.