Is there a fee for ending an eBay auction early?

As an eBay seller, you might want to end an auction early for any reason. Maybe you have doubts about the highest bidder on your item, maybe your item suddenly became damaged, or maybe you just decided you don’t want to pay eBay a fee for selling.

Is there a fee for ending an eBay auction early?

Whatever your reason for canceling a listing may be, eBay does actually allow you to end just one auction style listing early per calendar year, which is from January 1st to December 31st. This means that if you end one listing on January 20th, 2013 you will not be charged a fee, but if you end another listing early on December 30th, 2013, you will be charged a fee because that is two listings ended early in one calendar year. Of course, if you decide to end a listing early on both January 20th, 2013 and January 17th, 2014 then you won’t be charged a fee since those dates fall in different calendar years.

The timeline for ending an auction early in eBay

If there is less than 12 hours left in the eBay auction listing, and you have 1 or more bids (with the reserve price being met), you can end the auction early, but then you must sell the item to the highest bidder. So, in this scenario you can not avoid selling the item and paying the eBay fee, but you are allowed to cancel the auction early. But, if less than 12 hours is left and you have no bids (including no cancelled bids), then

eBay also provides a table on this page so that you can see other scenarios for ending a listing early and the associated fees. Read it carefully!

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