How to Turn Off eBay Live: What 490 Reviews Say (2026)

If you searched for a way to turn off eBay Live, this article opens with the answer rather than making you scroll for it. Then it shows the data behind that answer, because the answer is annoying and you deserve to know how many other people got the same one.

We pulled the 500 newest US Google Play reviews for eBay on 4 August 2026, plus the current US App Store feed. 218 of the 500 Play reviews were rated 1-3 stars: 174 one-star, 24 two-star, 20 three-star. After removing reviews too short to categorise, 175 Android reviews remained, spanning 25 July to 2 August 2026. The iOS feed returned 328 negative reviews, 315 of them with enough text to use, spanning 15 June to 29 July 2026. Total categorised set: 490 reviews.

At that moment the Android app held 4.56 stars from 5,013,924 ratings with 100,000,000+ installs, and the iOS app held 4.82 stars from 4,969,143 ratings on build 6.267.0.

The Short Answer

No reviewer in this set of 490 found an in-app setting that removes eBay Live from the home screen. Not one. 62 reviews mention eBay Live, and 29 of those explicitly ask for a toggle, a switch, an opt-out, or a way to hide it. The most detailed of them walks through the settings menu and reports coming up empty:

eBay has made eBay Live a permanent fixture on the app's home screen with no way to remove it through the app's own settings. You can't opt out, you can't hide it, and there's no toggle anywhere. Just auto playing livestreams taking up screen space whether you want them or not.

That is the finding. What follows is what people did instead, ranked by how many reviewers reported it working.

What Reviewers Actually Did Instead

1. Skip the home screen entirely. This is the least satisfying and most effective answer. eBay Live occupies the home feed. It does not occupy search results, your Watchlist, your saved searches, your Purchases tab, or a seller's store page. If you open the app and immediately tap the search bar or the Watchlist tab, you never load the Live carousel. Several reviewers describe arriving at this on their own, usually while complaining about it.

2. Use the mobile site with a content blocker. One reviewer who uninstalled the app went this route and was honest about the tradeoff:

App now puts out an unavoidable Live events from sellers and items I have no interest in. I've now uninstalled it. Site can be accessible on a mobile browser, but you'll have to install blocker extensions to disable annoying Live events.

This works, and it costs you push notifications for auctions you are bidding on. Given that 22 reviews in this set complain about eBay's notifications, several of them specifically about missing the alerts that matter while receiving the ones that do not, that may not be the loss it sounds like.

3. Do not bother staying on an old app version. A recurring line in this set is that eBay blocks older builds outright. One Android reviewer running a fleet of older devices for a business describes it plainly: "eBay has dropped support for older OS versions. The app completely blocks usage with an unbypassable update prompt." Another wrote in German that after an update the phone was suddenly "too old" on Android 14. Version-pinning is not an escape route here.

4. If you want to watch Live and cannot, that is a separate bug. This is the strange mirror image of the complaint. Some reviewers are angry that Live is everywhere. Others are angry that Live will not play. An Italian reviewer captured the second group:

Italian

che applicazione di m....a impossibilitato a guardare le live, chiede di aggiornare l app e non c'e nessun aggiornamento disponibile, ormai ho perso il conto dei mesi che e cosi

That is: the app tells them to update in order to watch Live, and no update exists. Months of it. An Android reviewer reported the same loop in English. So the feature that cannot be turned off also cannot reliably be turned on.

How Big Is the eBay Live Complaint, Really

62 of 490 reviews, 13%. That is the second-largest cluster in the set, and it is the fastest-moving one. On Android it is 27 of 175 (15%). On iOS it is 35 of 315 (11%).

Read that split carefully, because it is not what it looks like. The iOS sample stretches back to mid-June and the Android sample covers only the last nine days of July and the first two of August. eBay Live complaints are denser in the newer, tighter window. Whatever changed, it changed recently, and one reviewer names the moment: "Most recent update shoves it front and center and you don't even see items you recently viewed or watched anymore."

The tone across those 62 is unusually consistent for a review sample. These are not new users bouncing off an unfamiliar app. They are long-tenured buyers and sellers, and they say so in the first sentence: "long time seller", "I've been using ebay for years", "Always been 5 star but", "I've been an eBay user since 2006". The complaint is not that eBay Live is bad. It is that it is mandatory.

Ebay used to do one thing and it did it really well. Now if you open the app, you will be flood with livestreams and reels in an app that you opened for a used marketplace.

They need to split the live video into a separate app. The people who actually use eBay do not want to see a wave of AI generated slop and streamer culture.

German

uberall wird man mit dem Ebay Live Mull zugespamt. Filtern nach dem gunstigsten Angebot ist Dank Sammelangeboten kaum noch moglich. Suchergebnisse werden immer unbrauchbarer.

That German review does something useful: it links Live to a second, quieter complaint. Filtering by cheapest offer barely works anymore, and search results keep getting less usable. Several English reviewers describe the same drift. One searched a phone in the phone category and got phone cases. Another set a year filter of 1999 and got results from 2010 to 2026.

The Bigger Cluster Nobody Searches For

If eBay Live is 13% of this set, what is bigger?

Customer support: 79 reviews, 16%. And 22 of those name AI, a chatbot, or a bot as the reason the conversation went nowhere. This is the largest single cluster in 490 reviews, and unlike eBay Live it produces no search traffic, because people do not look up "how to turn off the support bot". They just leave.

I've attempted 14 times to reach customer service for help with an issue. The seller has tried as well. The chat bot always says technical issues and try again later. We are on day 9 of the issue and no response from eBay.

ever since eBay started pushing their AI support chatbots and hiding their support phone numbers, things have gotten more frustrating to handle. It makes things super hard to figure out when the chatbot keeps giving out and forces you to go to an agent anyway.

A reviewer on the Polish store wrote in English and pasted the exact text of the automated determination they received, which is the most concrete evidence in the whole sample of where the decisions are being made:

Polish

We looked into your report and didn't find the listing to be in violation of our policy. This determination was made using automation or artificial intelligence.

A German reviewer described the same machine closing the same kind of case: complain about counterfeit goods, an AI replies asking what the problem is since you got what you ordered, case closed, money gone, shop keeps selling. A French reviewer reported paying shipping twice because of a site bug and finding only a phone robot that could not take the explanation. A Spanish reviewer called the AI claims process deficient by name.

Five languages, one mechanism.

Sellers: Fees, Held Payouts, and Sudden Suspensions

55 reviews, 11%, mention fees. The figures reviewers report cluster between 13% and 15% before promoted-listing costs, and the number that makes people write reviews is not the percentage but the arithmetic at the end:

I sold a ps2 for 90 bucks (after shipping) Well between taxes and fees plus the promotion my 90 turns into 60.

French

j'ai vendu mon vieux telephone pour 250$, le vendeur a payer 10$ pour la livraison, je dois payer 17$, ebay ma pris 90$ de frais

One reviewer asked for the single feature that would defuse most of this: show net earnings after all fees at the moment of listing, not after the sale. That request appears more than once and it is not a hard build.

21 reviews, 4%, describe money that exists but cannot be moved. These are the worst reviews in the set, because the reviewer usually needs the money on a deadline:

I sold 2 items and I was only told I would get paid 2 days after they were delivered.. the day they were delivered it changed to a whole month until MY money would be available to me. I've spoke with eBay and they will not release these funds.

I have enough money on eBay to pay it, but apparently there's no known fix to the issue and the only thing I can do is wait till it's fixed

36 reviews, 7%, describe an account suspended or banned. In 14 of those, the reviewer says no reason was given, and several report being told the reason cannot be shared.

I asked why and the rep told me that they can't tell me why. That's it's not something they can share.

They suspend my new account for no reason all I did was try to sell an item. When I asked what I can do to fix it customer service basically said they can't share that info with me and told me to go find another site.

Stack the three clusters and the shape of the problem shows up. An automated system flags your account or your listing. The reason is withheld as policy. The appeal route is the support channel, and the support channel is the bot from the previous section. 18 reviews, 4%, describe an item that never arrived or arrived not as described, and they hit the same wall from the buyer side.

The Listing Flow Changed and Sellers Noticed

15 reviews, 3%, are about the listing tools specifically, and they read like a regression report rather than a preference:

App was updated and now it takes 10x longer to list an item. You can upload a picture of your item first, you have to describe it first which is an unnecessary step.

Selling used to be easy. 'Just snap a few pics and we'll help with the rest'. That's how it used to be, until the updates. Now you are either starting from scratch, or hoping you can find a similar product listed. PLEASE roll this back.

One iOS reviewer reported that pasting text into a new listing works a few times and then silently stops until the device is restarted. A Spanish reviewer spent an hour and a half on a single listing and did the maths out loud on whether the platform was worth it at that rate. If you sell in volume, test the current flow on five items before you commit a weekend to it.

What To Do Right Now

1. Stop opening the home screen. Search bar or Watchlist tab, every time. This is the only reliable way to avoid eBay Live inside the app today.

2. Use saved searches instead of browsing. They still work, they still notify, and they bypass the feed entirely. If your saved-search alerts are firing on listings that no longer exist, you are not alone. Several reviewers report exactly that.

3. Audit your notification settings after every update. Multiple reviewers report that updates re-enable channels they had switched off, and that promotional messages get filed under the same channel as sale alerts so you cannot mute one without losing the other.

4. Before you list, calculate your net. Item price minus final value fee minus promoted-listing percentage minus shipping you actually pay. Do it once by hand for a typical item. The reviews in this set are full of people who did it for the first time after the payout landed.

5. If a payout is held, get the specific reason and the specific release date in writing. Reviewers who accepted "wait" as an answer are the ones still waiting weeks later. The 30-day hold on new sellers is a policy, not a bug, and knowing that before you list changes whether you list.

6. For anything expensive, keep the case inside the platform's clock. The strongest recurring warning in this set is from buyers who discovered a problem after the reporting window closed and found the support ticket system would not accept a report on an order that old.

7. If you want out, close the account properly rather than deleting the app. See our eBay cancellation and account guide for the refund and account-closure steps, including how store-billed subscriptions behave when you stop them.

The Bottom Line

Two ratings sit at the top of this article: 4.56 on Android across five million ratings, 4.82 on iOS across five million more. Those are the numbers of a marketplace that works. Most transactions complete. Most of the time nobody writes anything.

What 490 recent negative reviews describe is narrower and more specific than "eBay is bad". A video feature has been made permanent on the home screen of an app people open to search for a specific used object, and 29 people took the trouble to ask for a switch that does not exist. Underneath that, the support layer that used to catch the failures has been replaced by something that closes cases with the sentence "This determination was made using automation or artificial intelligence", in five languages, to buyers and sellers alike.

The first problem is a product decision and eBay can reverse it with one toggle. The second is the one that turns a 20-year customer into a review that starts "I closed my account today".

Read the current 1-3 star reviews yourself on the eBay review page, check the trust summary at is eBay legit, compare marketplace apps with better complaint ratios, or see the iOS listing on the eBay iOS review page.

Related reading: Poshmark vs Mercari vs Depop vs OfferUp vs eBay: Resale Apps Ranked puts eBay next to the five apps its sellers keep naming as alternatives. Is OfferUp Legit? What the Reviews Say covers the local-marketplace version of the same scam and support complaints.