eBay are at last to do something that people have been asking for for years – free up some of the oldest eBay User Ids that haven’t been used for years.

eBay have sent out emails to users with dormant accounts saying “We noticed that you haven’t signed in to your eBay account for quite some time, and we’d like to invite you back to buy and sell again. eBay’s a great place to buy what you want, and sell what you have.“.

They go on to add “Unfortunately, since you haven’t used your eBay account for a while, it will be deleted if you don’t sign in within 30 days from the day this email was sent.”

I’ve never heard of eBay deleting an account before – even when eBay have closed accounts for Trust and Safety reasons the accounts and About Me pages have always remained live on the site.

What this means is that potentially some of the oldest eBay User ID’s from dormant accounts will become available to be re-registered at some time in the near future. If dormant account users don’t log in and their accounts are deleted then the User Ids could potentially become available again.

We don’t know how old the accounts are scheduled for deletion and we don’t know how long an account has to have been left unused before eBay consider it dormant and ready to be deleted. However if you have old accounts that you want to keep it’s worth signing in and possibly making a purchase on them to ensure they stay alive.

Is there a User ID that you’ve wanted for years for your business? If so you might just be able to grab it in a month or so if you still want it.