eBay Design 2025 in review

We spend every day reimagining and improving how people connect on eBay. In 2025, our design team delivered new experiences that make buying and selling easier and more meaningful.

eBay Live taps into the way the world works—and shops—to allow our passionate community of people to layer more personality into their listings. In 2025 we overhauled the experience and brought Live front and center.

This evolution raised the bar for our buyers and sellers with enhanced design, features, and functionality to make it even easier—and even more fun—to tap into our deep inventory. We also built a stronger bridge between the core eBay buying journey and the Live format, making it easier and more intuitive for buyers to move between them.

Buyers can now move through eBay with greater confidence, starting with a smarter AI-powered search experience to more easily find what they’re looking for. As Barbara Kofler, a Senior Content Designer, sees it: "We're focused on ways to support buyers moving fluidly between exploration, filtering, and information-seeking.”

When it’s time to pay, eBay Balance allows buyers to keep proceeds from returns or sales to use for future purchases. Turns out a lot of people like to shop this way. In the UK, eBay Balance enables our several million active C2C sellers to utilize their sales earnings for eBay purchases, generating incremental GMV.

While buyers saw a number of enhancements to the eBay experience in 2025, the seller toolkit got some impressive upgrades as well.

Traditional user testing with this group can be a challenge, as sellers are often less engaged and harder to recruit. To tackle this, we leaned heavily into internally-built AI tools which allow us to test specific user scenarios with strong predictive capabilities.

One of the key pain points we identified for sellers is the listing creation process. Manually entering information is time-consuming and increases the likelihood of errors. With AI-powered automation, listings can be generated almost instantly. Sellers simply take a photo or video of an item—or even a room full of items—and the system automatically generates listing details, including expected pricing and more.

Currently available in Australia, eBay My Closet creates a seamless experience for organizing and reselling an expanding wardrobe. Stored preferences and AI learning allow for enhanced recommendations, and shoppers can even sync their off-eBay purchases from top retailers.

eBay OPEN25 creates a place for our passionate community of online sellers to connect IRL. Hosted at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas and livestreamed around the world, this year’s theme was “Fueling Your Future” featuring keynote speakers, hands-on workshops, and seller panels around topics including: AI, marketing, financial solutions, and future selling strategies. This year’s event was bigger and better than ever with over 1,300 sellers in attendance to learn from the best in the business how to ignite their business.

eBay Design crafted a space with bespoke experiences for sellers to engage with. Attendees experienced a cohesive look and feel, whether participating in person or virtually. eBay’s Evo design system proved effective not only within the app experience, but also as a scalable visual language for physical environments—establishing a strong foundation for how eBay’s visual language can continue to evolve and grow in the future.

In 2026, eBay Design will help people find more of what they love by continuing to evolve our experience. Join us!