eBay Live — the livestream selling format eBay has been rolling out in the UK as an invite/interest beta — is getting its own performance lane. eBay's UK seller standards policy now states that from 15 October 2026, Live transactions will no longer be counted in seller standards or service metrics calculations. The line most coverage skips: the exclusion applies "including all transactions completed before this date" — it's retroactive, not just forward-looking.
Three things stop counting Live sales: your seller standards level (Top Rated / Above Standard / Below Standard), your service metrics, and — per eBay's announcement of the change — Top Rated Plus eligibility. Live orders don't disappear from your order history, reports, or payouts; they just stop feeding the performance maths. eBay says Live will get its own evaluation criteria, but hasn't yet published what those are or what consequences attach to them.
Seller standards feed Top Rated status (evaluated on the 20th of each month, with upgrades on the 1st of the following month), and Top Rated status is what unlocks the Top Rated Plus final-value-fee discount on qualifying listings. So if Live sales have been propping up your volumes or your defect rates — in either direction — your status can move when they're pulled out of the calculation. eBay itself notes some sellers may see an improvement; any reductions are deferred to the following evaluation. Either way, a status change lands directly on your fee line, which is why it belongs in your fee planning and not just your dashboard.
If you've never run a Live event, nothing changes for you — your standards were already computed from ordinary sales alone, and stay that way. If you have sold through Live in the UK beta, the sales history you built there stops counting on 15 October, retroactively. Worth doing before the 20 October evaluation: check your seller dashboard's transaction counts and defect rate with Live sales mentally removed, and see whether you still clear the Top Rated thresholds on marketplace sales alone.
eBay's UK Live FAQ describes the format (live auctions with 10-second extensions, Buy It Now, UK registration required) but publishes no separate UK fee schedule for Live sales — US coverage reports discounted Live rates on ebay.com, but we could not verify an equivalent UK rate card, so don't assume one. Until eBay publishes UK Live fees, the safe planning assumption is your normal category rates — which you can check on your own numbers with our calculator.
Sources: eBay UK seller standards policy (the 15 October 2026 exclusion, quoted verbatim; evaluation dates) and eBay's Live FAQ for the UK, both read 30 September 2026; Top Rated Plus eligibility detail from eBay's announcement as reported by Value Added Resource, 22 September 2026. Not affiliated with eBay Inc. Not financial advice.