Does eBay support Israel?

Announced on 1 June 2005 the acquisition of NASDAQ-listed, Israeli-founded Shopping.com Ltd. for about $620 million in cash. Shopping.com's Israeli operation became the basis of eBay's research and development center in Netanya.

Acquired Tel Aviv startup The Gifts Project, which powered eBay's Group Gifts feature, for a reported ~$20 million, and turned its team into an eBay social-commerce development center in Israel.

Operated a research and development center in Netanya for about two decades, established in 2005 after the Shopping.com acquisition and expanded through later purchases of Israeli startups. This relationship has ended: in May 2025 eBay announced "the difficult decision to close our office in Israel during the first quarter of 2026," laying off the remaining ~200 employees after earlier cuts to Israeli marketing and sales staff. Hebrew press records the earlier rounds: dozens of Israeli jobs in 2018; eBay's February 2023 global cut of 500 jobs, about 4% of its staff, which reached the Netanya centre; and more than 20 of about 250 Israeli employees in December 2023, in a global reorganisation that ice, citing Calcalist, said was not connected to the war.

eBay's employee-giving portal (run on Benevity) offered staff, including in Dublin, the option to donate to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces with "100% donation matching" listed as "Matching by eBay Foundation." This is an employee-donation channel matched by the eBay Foundation, not a direct corporate donation; eBay did not respond to the Dublin Inquirer's query about it.

eBay’s international site temporarily stopped selling to Israel during the war with Iran. Shoppers who tried to order were told that, because of service-provider disruptions in the Middle East conflict area, eBay was suspending sales for the time being in eight countries — Bahrain, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Calcalist reported this on 11 March 2026, alongside Amazon freezing personal-import orders to Israel on the Monday night before publication, and argued that the two halts drained the effect of the increase in Israel’s personal-import VAT exemption from $75 to $150 initiated by finance minister Bezalel Smotrich; AliExpress kept shipping to Israel by cargo, and the British children’s-clothing site Next kept supplying orders while warning customers of longer delivery times; iHerb had blocked orders from Israel at the start of the war and reopened them a few days before publication. The suspension was temporary and applied to the conflict area, not to Israel alone.