Forced to combine items for an order?

I've been using ebay for years, and have occasionally manually combined items for combined shipping here and there; but the other day a customer bought two items and ebay combined them automatically without asking and with no way to separate the two orders to ship individually. I never opted into anything, and ebay has never done this before, am i missing something?
Normally it wouldn't be an issue, but one of the items was really long but thin, and the other was a larger cube shape, which wouldve ended up with a lot of empty space and i dont have a box to accommodate that.

i contacted support, and they had me purchase two labels for the same combined order which just felt odd. Was there a mandatory change to the way combined shipping works recently or am i just dumb?