eBay spent August rolling out bundle discounts in phases. As of the last couple of weeks it is open to everyone. On eBay's own seller webinar, Evan Swanson from the B2C product team put it plainly: "That's why we are launching bundle discounts. It's available to all sellers starting this week."[2] It is still sitting near the top of eBay's September seller news, right alongside the holiday prep material.[4][11]
The feature itself is simple. You set a percentage off for buyers who take two items, a bigger one for three, a bigger one again for four or more. It works across multiple quantities of the same listing, across different listings, or a mix of both.[1][3]
Here is the part worth stopping for. It is opt in, but the opt in is not per listing. Once you turn it on, bundle discounts apply to all of your eligible listings by default, and every new listing you create after that gets added automatically unless you go exclude it.[1] Your $9 thrift tee and your $180 vintage jacket are in the same promotion until you say otherwise.
That is the behavior change: before your first multi item order lands, you need tier percentages that survive contact with your worst margin item, and an exclusion list for the ones that do not.
What Bundle Discounts Actually Do
Three tiers, at two items, three items, and four or more.[1][3] A typical setup looks like 10 percent off two, 15 percent off three, 20 percent off four or more.[3]
The buyer sees the discount as they add items. You do not build a bundle listing, you do not pick which items go together, and you do not set an end date. That last bit is what separates this from the promotions you may already run.
Sellers in the eBay community caught the distinction immediately. One put it this way: "Unlike the settings under Marketing this would apply globally and permanently. No need to select an end date."[7] Another asked the obvious question out loud: "So how is this different than going to the marketing dashboard and implementing an order discount?"[8]
The answer is scope and permanence. An order discount is a campaign you build, aim, and expire. Bundle discounts are a standing setting on your whole store. If you run your account the way most resellers do, with prices set item by item and margins that swing from 20 percent to 300 percent, a store wide standing discount is a different kind of decision.
The Real Math on a Two Item Tier
Discount percentages are easy to eyeball and easy to get wrong, because the sticker number is not what you actually give up. Fees move with the price, and eBay's per order fee does not.
eBay charges 13.6 percent of the total sale in most categories for sellers without a Store subscription, calculated per item, plus a per order fee of $0.40 on orders over $10 and $0.30 on orders of $10 or less. That per order fee is charged once per order, not per item.[5] Store subscribers pay 12.7 percent in most categories instead.[6] An order, in eBay's definition, is any number of items a buyer takes at checkout with the same shipping method.[5]
So take two $25 items in a standard category, no Store subscription, and set shipping aside for a moment.
Sold separately, that is two orders. You pay 13.6 percent on each item, so $3.40 twice, which is $6.80. Then two per order fees at $0.40, which is $0.80. Fees total $7.60 and you keep $42.40.
Sold together at a 10 percent two item tier, the buyer pays $45. You pay 13.6 percent on $45, which is $6.12, plus a single $0.40 per order fee. Fees total $6.52 and you keep $38.48.
The gap is $3.92, not $5.00. The discount shrinks your fee base and merges two per order fees into one, so about 78 percent of the sticker discount actually comes out of your pocket. That is the number to plan around.
It also tells you what the tier has to earn. If the bundle discount is what convinces someone to take the second item, you traded $3.92 for a $25 sale. Good trade. If that buyer was going to take both anyway, you handed over $3.92 for nothing. Which of those happens depends entirely on whether your inventory gives buyers a reason to bundle, and that is a sourcing question, not a settings question.
Set Tiers From Your Floor, Not Your List Price
The mistake to avoid is picking 10, 15, and 20 because they look tidy and then discovering what 20 percent does to the bottom of your inventory.
Work it backwards instead. Take your thinnest margin item that will be eligible. Say you paid $9 for it, you list it at $25, and after fees and a label you have decided $22 is the lowest price you will accept. At a 10 percent two item tier it sells at $22.50 and you are fine. At the 20 percent four or more tier it sells at $20, and you just went under your own floor without anyone asking you.
eBay's bundle switch does not know your floor. It has no idea what you paid, what your label costs, or which items you are already selling near break even to clear shelf space.
So do this in order. Find your lowest acceptable price on the worst item you are willing to include. Divide that by your list price to get the deepest discount that item can survive. Set your top tier at or below that number. Then set your two and three item tiers underneath it. If that top tier comes out at 7 percent and looks unimpressive next to the tidy 20, that is your inventory telling you something true.
Then handle the items that cannot survive even your smallest tier. eBay lets you exclude specific listings from your bundle inventory at any time, and that is the lever that keeps this from being a blunt instrument.[1] Exclude your consignment pieces, anything where the buyer already has you near break even, and anything with a shipping cost out of proportion to its price.
Then remember the default. New listings join automatically.[1] Excluding a listing today does nothing for the twelve you list on Sunday. Whatever exclusion pass you do now becomes a recurring habit, or the setting quietly re expands on you.
What Stacks and What Does Not
This matters more than it sounds, because most active sellers already have something running.
Bundle discounts can be combined with eBay sitewide promotions and sale events.[1] So a buyer can catch an eBay funded sale and your bundle tier on the same item. If you have been putting inventory into eBay sale events, that stacking is where an unplanned discount gets deep.
Bundle discounts cannot be combined with seller coupons, seller order discounts, volume pricing, or other seller promotional codes.[1] When more than one discount could apply, eBay applies whichever is the better deal for the buyer.[1]
The practical read: if you already run order discounts or volume pricing, you are not adding a layer, you are entering a competition where the buyer wins. Before you turn bundles on, go look at what is already live in your marketing settings and decide which tool you actually want doing this job. Running both is how you end up unable to explain your own numbers.
One more thing sellers flagged early, and eBay's help page does not settle: partial returns. As one seller put it, "Some wild automatic calculations for Refunds appear to built-in should a Buyer return part of a Bundle. Could get interestingly complicated for both a Seller and Buyer."[8] Another said the shipping side alone was enough to keep them out for now.[8] Until that is clearer, be conservative with bundles on items that come back often, which for most of us means anything sized and worn.
Shipping Is Where the Bundle Has to Pay You Back
A bundle discount that does not consolidate a shipment is just a price cut.
The upside is real when it works. Two items in one box is one label instead of two, plus the merged per order fee.[5] eBay lets you create a single shipping label for multiple orders going to the same buyer through the bulk shipping tool, and you can set combined shipping rules in your shipping preferences so buyers are offered it automatically.[9] eBay has also been adding a tag to help sellers notice the opportunity, which eBay's Bill MacEwen described as being "designed to help you spot an opportunity to send the buyer all their orders in the same box."[10]
Two cautions. First, the merged per order fee only happens when the buyer takes both items in one checkout with the same shipping method.[5] Two separate checkouts are two orders, whatever ends up in the box. Second, consolidating only helps if the items actually travel well together. A pair of jeans and a ceramic mug in one box is a damage claim waiting to happen, and no fee saving covers that.
If you are going to run bundles, set your combined shipping rules the same day. The two settings are one decision.
Timing wise, there is no reason to sit on this. eBay's holiday playbook, built on a survey of 2,000 US shoppers, found 57 percent expect to start holiday shopping by October or earlier.[2][10] Whatever you configure now is what runs through the front half of Q4.
How ListForge Helps You Pick a Number You Can Defend
Every decision above comes down to one thing: knowing the lowest price each item can take before it stops being worth selling. eBay will happily discount an item to a number you never agreed to, because it has no idea what you paid. ListForge does.
- Enter what you paid on any item, on desktop or in the mobile app, and the item page estimates what you would keep on each connected marketplace after that marketplace's fees, your shipping cost, and packaging. That is the net number your bundle tiers should be measured against, not your list price.
- Set a floor per item, in plain dollars, right on the pricing panel next to your ceiling.
- Turn on Sale Manager and that floor becomes a hard limit. The engine will not propose a price move, an offer, or an auto accept threshold below it, and it refuses to act at all on an item with no floor configured rather than guessing at one.
- Set the limits you want it working inside: max drop per change, max total drop, minimum days between price changes, max offer discount, days between offer waves, and max ad rate.
- Every item carries its own override that beats your account default, so a consignment piece or a near break even item can be excluded from management permanently while everything else runs. That is the same exclusion discipline eBay's bundle setting now demands, and it does not reset when you list new inventory.
- Recommendations land in Tasks with the reasoning attached, so you approve the move rather than discover it. You can raise the automation level per lever once you trust it.
- Ask the assistant for a profit report on any period and it will reconcile revenue, marketplace fees, shipping, refunds, and cost of goods into one view, so you can see what your discounting actually cost you last month instead of estimating.
ListForge does not set your eBay bundle tiers for you. What it does is give you the number to set them from, on every item, before the discount is already live.
Start free at list-forge.ai.
Sources
[1] https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/selling-tools/selling-bundle-discounts?id=5842 - eBay Help: Bundle discounts for sellers [2] https://www.valueaddedresource.net/ebay-holiday-2026-webinar-handbook - Value Added Resource: eBay Opens Bundle Discounts To All Sellers Ahead Of Holiday Season [3] https://www.valueaddedresource.net/ebay-bundled-discounts - Value Added Resource: eBay Adds Bundled Discounts As It Expands Seller Promotion Tools [4] https://www.ebay.com/sellercenter/news/2026-september - eBay Seller Center: Seller News September 2026 [5] https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/fees-credits-invoices/selling-fees?id=4364 - eBay Help: Selling fees [6] https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/fees-credits-invoices/store-selling-fees?id=4809 - eBay Help: Store selling fees [7] https://community.ebay.com/forum/selling-57920/topic/new-bundled-discounts-option-471632 - eBay Community: New Bundled Discounts Option [8] https://community.ebay.com/forum/selling-57920/topic/bundle-discounts-an-opt-in-option-469682 - eBay Community: Bundle Discounts an Opt In Option [9] https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/shipping-items/shipping-rates/offering-combined-shipping?id=4169 - eBay Help: Offering combined shipping [10] https://www.ecommercebytes.com/2026/08/22/ebay-publishes-2026-holiday-selling-playbook-reviews-new-selling-features - EcommerceBytes: eBay Publishes 2026 Holiday Selling Playbook, Reviews New Selling Features [11] https://www.valueaddedresource.net/ebay-september-2026-seller-news - Value Added Resource: eBay September 2026 Seller News