How to Block a Buyer on eBay, and What Not Blocking Actually Costs You
eBay lets you block individual buyers from bidding on or purchasing your items, and the list holds up to 5,000 usernames. The process takes under a minute once you know which page to open, which is the part most guides get wrong.
The harder question is when blocking is worth it. A problem buyer is not just an annoyance; a case they open carries a specific percentage on top of your normal selling fees, and that percentage is different in every market. If you sell across borders, it is worth seeing how far apart those markets are before you decide how aggressive your blocking policy should be.
Contents
- How to block a buyer
- How to unblock someone
- The two questions eBay does not answer
- Buyer requirements are a different tool
- What a bad buyer costs across seven markets
- Where blocking does not help
- When blocking is the wrong move
- Conclusion
How to block a buyer
Go to the Block bidders or buyers from your listings page, type the username into the text box, and select Submit. That is the whole procedure.
The direct page is the part worth remembering. Several widely-read guides route you through My eBay, Account, then Site Preferences, and others send you into Seller Hub. eBay's own blocking help page, verified 11 August 2026, describes neither path. It names the blocking page directly.
The text box holds up to 5,000 usernames, and you edit the list as a block of text rather than as individual entries. That design has one consequence people discover the hard way: it is easy to wipe the list with a careless paste. eBay anticipated this and included a Restore list option that brings back a previous blocked bidder or buyer list.
A blocked member cannot place bids or buy from you until you remove them from the list. That is the whole of what eBay commits to.
How to unblock someone
Open the same page, delete the username from the text box, and select Submit.
There is no separate unblock screen and no confirmation step beyond the submit itself. Because you are editing raw text, removing one name means finding it inside the block, which is why sellers with large lists tend to keep a copy outside eBay.
The two questions eBay does not answer
Two questions come up in almost every discussion of blocking, and eBay's help page answers neither.
The first is notification. eBay does not state whether a blocked member is told they have been blocked. The page describes only the effect on bidding and buying.
The second is visibility. eBay does not state whether a blocked member can still see your listings. Again the page speaks only about the ability to bid and buy.
Plenty of third-party guides answer both questions confidently. None of them cite eBay for it, because there is nothing on the official page to cite. The honest position is that eBay defines blocking narrowly, as a restriction on transacting, and stays silent on the rest.
Wondering whether a problem buyer is worth the trouble of blocking? Price the downside first.
Buyer requirements are a different tool
Blocking handles people you have already met. Buyer requirements handle people you have not.
Instead of naming individuals, requirements filter by criteria. eBay's examples on the same page are buyers living in a country you do not ship to, and buyers with excessive cancelled orders because they did not pay for items. You can also exclude specific postage locations, including regions, countries and PO boxes, from your listings.
The distinction matters for how you use them:
| Blocked buyers list | Buyer requirements | |
|---|---|---|
| Targets | Named individuals | Anyone matching a criterion |
| Capacity | Up to 5,000 usernames | Rules, not a count |
| Set up | Once per person, after an incident | Once, then it runs |
| Best for | Someone who already caused a problem | Preventing a category of problem |
| Recoverable | Yes, via Restore list | Edit the criteria any time |
Most sellers who feel they are blocking constantly are really missing a requirement. If the same category of buyer keeps causing the same problem, a rule handles it once instead of a name at a time.
What a bad buyer costs across seven markets
This is the part almost nobody quantifies, and it is the reason blocking is a financial decision rather than an emotional one.
When a buyer opens a case saying the item was not as described, eBay applies a surcharge on top of your normal selling fees. The rate varies by market. These figures come from the seven official eBay fee pages, all on data version 24 July 2026:
| Market | Not-as-described surcharge | Top Rated discount | Surcharge cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 5.00% | 10.00% | None |
| United Kingdom | 4.00% | 10.00% | None |
| Germany | 4.00% | 0.00% | €990.00 |
| Australia | 5.50% | 0.00% | None |
| Canada | 5.00% | 10.00% | None |
| France | None | 10.00% | None |
| Italy | 4.00% | 10.00% | None |
Four findings sit in that table.
France is the only one of the seven markets with no not-as-described surcharge at all. A French seller carries the refund and the shipping cost of a bad case, but not the fee penalty.
Germany is the only market that caps the surcharge, and the cap is €990.00. Above that sale value, the extra percentage stops accumulating.
Germany and Australia are the only two markets where Top Rated status carries a 0.00% fee discount. The common argument that you should block aggressively to protect your Top Rated badge is a US, UK, Canadian, French and Italian argument. In Germany and Australia the badge does not reduce your fees, so the case for blocking there rests on the surcharge alone.
Australia is the most expensive place to lose a case, at 5.50%, which sits 0.50 points above the next highest.
The surcharge is also not where the cost stops. Cases feed your defect rate, and a defect rate low enough to drop you into Below Standard carries a further charge on every sale, not just disputed ones. That escalation works differently in each market, and we set it out country by country in eBay Below Standard fees across seven markets.
Selling into more than one of these markets? Compare the surcharge side by side.
Where blocking does not help
Blocking is preventive and backward-looking at the same time: it stops the next transaction with someone who already caused the last one. It does nothing about several situations sellers expect it to fix.
It does not remove feedback already left. It does not reverse a case in progress. It does not stop someone contacting you through a listing question if they are not blocked from messaging.
Bid management is also a separate mechanism. Cancelling an existing bid and blocking the bidder who placed it are two different actions in two different places, and buyer-side bid retraction is a third. We untangle all three in our guide to retracting a bid on eBay.
When blocking is the wrong move
There is a version of blocking that costs you money rather than saving it.
A private seller in the United Kingdom pays no final value fee on domestic sales, so the fee arithmetic that justifies aggressive blocking for a business seller does not apply in the same way. The UK fee calculator shows how far apart the two seller types are.
Blocking on suspicion is the other failure. A buyer who asks a lot of questions is not a problem buyer, and a list built from irritation shrinks your audience without reducing your risk. The 5,000 capacity is generous enough that this rarely bites, but a habit of blocking early tends to travel with a habit of describing items loosely, and the second one is what actually generates cases.
Conclusion
Blocking is a one-minute action with a clear boundary around what it does and does not do.
- The path is the Block bidders or buyers page directly, not My eBay preferences and not Seller Hub.
- The list holds 5,000 usernames and a deleted list can be recovered with Restore list.
- eBay does not state whether blocked members are notified or can still view listings, and neither should anyone else.
- One not-as-described case costs 5.50% in Australia, 5.00% in the US and Canada, 4.00% in the UK, Germany and Italy, and nothing in France.
Block the person who already cost you a case, set a buyer requirement for the category of person who might, and describe your items accurately enough that neither tool gets much use.