If anyone else was unsuccessful with using ebay bucks to purchase coins, it appears to be a temporary glitch. According to some people who have inquired, ebay is working on a fix and it should be working tomorrow. https://www.reddit.com/r/Silverbugs/comments/5lurir/ebay_bucks_are_released/ If anyone is successful let us know! Also, note that ebay bucks will not be redeemable for the bullion section.
don't worry I got a 75 dollar gift card for Christmas. i was trying to buy vintage stamps with it (because you are not allowed to buy coins with gift cards) 2 days ago I bought these stamps and it said we are having tech difficulty's please try again later so I wait 2 days and it finally worked all it takes alot of waiting.
Interesting. I'd gotten one or more messages before saying that eBay Bucks would issue on Jan 3, but now I see in the eBay Bucks section of my account overview it says "January 4, 2017". Between this and the selling-promotion fiasco I posted about earlier, it looks to me like someone has tried to do some major rework on eBay's back-end code, and failed rather miserably. Glad I'm not them right now. (My turn comes later this month -- but our target audience is probably about a million times smaller than eBay's.)
ebay changed their policy. It's likely they thought people were using it to scam ebay (getting discounted gift cards; reselling the coins; buying more discounted gift cards, etc).
True (although coins, particularly bullion, have a smaller margin), but since ebay thinks it's an issue, they have changed the rules.