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Can eBay See Your IP Address? (+ 4 Ways to Avoid It)

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eBay can see your IP address to determine where you’re browsing from, track you online for ad serving/retargeting, and block your account.

Likewise, eBay logs your IP address for constant account monitoring, making it unsafe for you if that data shows up in a breach. It can also use your IP address information to block you from opening another account after one is suspended or blocking your other accounts.

Fortunately, you can prevent eBay from seeing and tracking your IP addresses.

Learn how to do that in this guide.

Why Do You Need to Keep eBay From Seeing Your IP Address?

Your IP address is vital to your online personality and should be guarded with jealousy. 

In the case of eBay, here are some significant reasons to ensure the ecommerce giant doesn’t have your IP on record.

Get Online Privacy

Logging your IP address helps with browser fingerprinting

This allows eBay to track your activity around the web, even when you’re not on its website anymore.

That’s why you sometimes see eBay ads on other websites you visit, based on your recent activity on the ecommerce platform.

ebay complete anti privacy
Use a VPN to prevent eBay from selling your personal data and logging your IP address

Likewise, such data-mapping pigeonholes the content and ads you see since eBay has decided your interests based on a few searches you made.

Thus, invading your privacy, limiting your ad options to discover new things, and risking your logged IP address falling into the wrong hands.

Prevent Doxxing

Several disgruntled buyers and sellers simply want someone to take it out on. 

It takes someone not being comfortable with your pricing or thinking you wasted their time during negotiation to flip the tables on you.

Besides your actual IP address already logged by eBay, hackers could obtain other personal information about you from your account profile. With that, a doxing attack might be up the road for you.

Insulation Against eBay Breaches

Big tech companies constantly get breached, losing sensitive user data to hackers. These hackers often sell that data on the black web for a profit.

ebay insulation against ebay breaches

While I’m sure eBay has safeguards against data leaks, it’s been embroiled in one that affected over 145 million customers in 2014. So, forgive me for not being confident that your IP address (tied to other sensitive information) won’t end up on the black market one day.

eBay Stealth Account Creation

eBay suspends accounts to keep the community safe but may also wrongfully suspend your account. In those cases, the eBay user’s IP address is blocked from opening a second account. It even goes so far as to block your other eBay accounts on the same IP address.

ebay stealth account creation

Thus, every device on your network won’t be able to create a new eBay account anymore. Not even if you tried changing the account name, email address, payment options, and other account-opening parameters.

Again, this is proof that the ecommerce brand logs and stores your IP address for the entirety of your account life. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been able to identify what IP range to block.

Multiple eBay Account Management

eBay sometimes suspends multiple accounts if the same person operates them. However, some eBay users may have legitimate reasons to open a second or third account, but the platform won’t understand that.

Thus, getting your eBay account suspended.

Likewise, eBay is notorious for banning all other accounts on the same IP address. 

This may even affect other eBay users using the same network in the same physical address, even though they’re distinct eBay members.

So, a VPN service is important to hide your real IP address, preventing eBay’s IP tracking from working against you. That way, you can have multiple accounts on different IPs without the system catching on.

How to Prevent eBay IP Address Tracking?

Now that you know the dangers of letting eBay see your IP address, it’s time to stop it from such invasive practices. Here are four methods to prevent eBay’s IP address tracking habits.

Method 1: Use a VPN – Easiest & Most Reliable Method

use a vpn
A NordVPN leak test showing how the VPN encrypts and protects your true IP address from eBay

Reliable VPN providers like NordVPN offer:

  • Robust AES 256-bit encryption: Which encodes all your internet traffic passing through to eBay, including details of your actual IP address.
  • Numerous servers: Thousands of servers in tens of countries, each with a unique IP address different from your usual IP address.
  • Kill switch: To prevent eBay from momentarily seeing your actual IP address if the VPN connection ever drops.
  • Zero logging policy: So, it doesn’t collect any data about you that eBay may request or may fall into a hacker’s hands.
  • Adblocking: That way, you escape the cycle of eBay’s ad retargeting, and these ads can’t be used to deanonymize you, either.
ebay account permanently suspended
Only use robust, secure and private VPNs like NordVPN to prevent account suspensions

These features are essential for a safe and private eBay experience. 

Also, the 5400+ servers in 59 countries offered by NordVPN ensure you can unblock several local eBay versions unavailable in your country.

And if your account ever gets blocked, you’ll get a new IP address from NordVPN to open a new account.

Thus, a VPN solves online privacy, new account creation, doxing, and breach problems.

How to Setup a VPN for eBay?

Setting up a VPN for eBay is easy. Enable the VPN kill switch, activate the suitable connection protocol, and choose the best VPN server.

I’ve included a stepwise guide to using a VPN for eBay here:

  1. Purchase a preferred VPN for eBay. I recommend NordVPN.
  2. Login with your account credentials.
  3. Enable the kill switch. Go to Settings > Kill Switch > toggle Internet Kill Switch.
enable the kill switch
  1. Choose the correct protocol. I recommend NordLynx for speed and security.
choose nordlynx protocol
  1. Search and connect to a preferred server. I like the US version of eBay, so I’ll choose the United States.
search and connect to us server
  1. Wait for the connection confirmation and test for leaks (go to www.ipleak.net).
  2. Create a new eBay account.
  3. Surf from the new account.

However, remember to ALWAYS connect to your VPN and stick to the server location you created your account from. That way, you don’t trigger VPN alerts on eBay, which may get your account banned.

Can You Use a Free VPN With Your eBay Account?

You can’t use a free VPN with eBay as the ecommerce platform cracks down on IP addresses assigned by these free VPNs. Thus, making it impossible to access eBay on a free VPN while risking an account ban from using a blacklisted IP address.

use free vpn with your ebay account
eBay catches onto free VPNs fast, and will block your account for using one

Thus, it’s best to choose a reliable VPN like NordVPN. With its 5500+ servers constantly being refreshed, eBay can’t blacklist all these IP addresses.

Method 2: Use a Proxy Service

Proxy services can also hide your IP address from eBay and prevent the platform from tracking your web activity. However, most free proxy servers have been mass-blacklisted by reputable online services like eBay.

use a proxy server

Likewise, hackers and malicious users sometimes leverage these proxy addresses they provided to get a backdoor into your systems. Thus, you’ll be compromising your privacy and security.

Despite that, some paid proxy services do well. Comparing the price to what you get from a VPN, though, it’s not worth it. After all, you’ll lose extra security features like robust encryption, a kill switch, and thousands of servers that would have improved your privacy against eBay.

Method 3: Use the Tor Browser

The Tor browser automatically secures your IP address by routing internet traffic to other servers. This makes it an ideal pick for eBay, but not without its shortcomings.

For example:

  • The Tor browser logs your actual IP address, unlike reliable VPNs. So, this data may still pass through to eBay.
  • Tor is challenging to set up for non-tech-savvy people. In comparison, a VPN is simply a plug-and-play tool.
  • It’s almost impossible to consistently choose a single server on the Tor browser. VPNs make this easy, avoiding server hopping-related bans on eBay.
  • Tor is very slow, and it may ruin your eBay shopping experience.

In fact, Tor’s vulnerabilities are such that we recommend layering Tor connections over NordVPN for robust security. Thus, you’ll be better off with the VPN standalone option instead.

Method 4: Try Different ISPs

Some ISPs assign dynamic IP addresses, while others give a single IP address per customer.

If your internet service provider (ISP) is the second, you can switch to a different ISP and see if you get a new IP address.

try different isps
Using different ISPs may not be enough to totally fool eBay into not finding your other accounts

Although this is a hit-and-miss approach, it works sometimes and may improve your chances of creating new accounts after a suspension.

However, trying different ISPs doesn’t protect you from the main issue, which is IP address logging.

So, eBay will still know your actual IP address. And there are only so many ISPs you can go through for eBay alone before you get tired of switching providers all the time.

Interesting Reads:

Frequently Asked Question

eBay doesn’t specifically block VPN traffic, but it blacklists known IP addresses from free VPNs and unreliable VPN providers. Thus, you may earn an account suspension, restriction, or outright ban from using these unreliable VPNs.

That’s why you should only manage eBay stealth accounts, unblock eBay access, or stay private on the ecommerce platform with reliable VPNs like NordVPN.

Get Your IP Privacy Back

You shouldn’t be at the mercy of a platform you’re contributing to by exchanging your IP address for the service you get. Considering everything that could go wrong, hiding your IP address from eBay is never a bad idea.

Thus, use these NordVPN discounts to hide your IP address from eBay, open and manage stealth accounts, avoid eBay tracking, and buy/sell anonymously.

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