BOSTON, July 30 -- David and Ina Steiner ran an e-commerce trade newsletter from their home in Natick, Massachusetts. They had covered the industry for twenty years. In 2019, the company they had spent those years writing about sent packages to their house containing live cockroaches, a preserved fetal pig, and a bloody pig mask. Their neighbor received unsolicited pornographic magazines. Someone tried to attach a GPS tracker to their car. Death threats arrived through social media direct messages.

The people who did this were executives at eBay.

Seven years later, eBay agreed to pay the Steiners $55.7 million to settle the civil lawsuit the couple filed in 2021. The settlement, announced Wednesday, includes $46.15 million from eBay dir...