Reselling News: A Federal Seller Bill of Rights and Poshmark Hazmat Coverage Drops to 5 Dollars August 1

Two pieces of reselling news landed this week, and they sit at opposite ends of the same worry. One is a bill in Congress about what happens when a marketplace freezes your account. The other is a small, dated fee change on Poshmark that is easy to miss and easy to avoid. Both come down to the same habit: know the rules before they cost you money.

Congress introduced an Online Sellers Bill of Rights

On July 22, Representatives Becca Balint of Vermont and Nydia Velazquez of New York introduced the Online Sellers Bill of Rights Act of 2026. The bill would set federal due-process and transparency rules for third-party sellers who get hit with account suspensions, frozen payouts, inventory holds, and sudden policy changes, per Value Added Resource.

The stated target is Amazon and Walmart, where sellers can have both their money and their inventory sitting inside a platform they do not control. But the language is broad enough to reach eBay, Etsy, Poshmark, and any marketplace where sellers have complained about vague suspensions, payment reserves, and enforcement mistakes made by an algorithm with no easy way to appeal.

It is a bill, not a law. It has to pass both chambers and get signed before any of it is real, and plenty of well-meaning seller bills never get that far. So the move here is not to wait on Washington. The move is to run your business as if no platform owes you a warning, because right now none of them do. Keep your own records of every sale and payout, do not let a large balance pile up inside one marketplace, and sell across more than one channel so a single suspension cannot switch off all of your income at once.

Poshmark hazmat fee coverage drops to 5 dollars on August 1

Back in July, USPS started charging a 50 dollar non-compliance fee on any package flagged for undeclared hazardous materials. Poshmark stepped in and covered the whole thing for its sellers, but that coverage is now stepping down. Poshmark pays 100 percent of the fee on packages postmarked through July 31. Starting August 1, the seller pays 5 dollars and Poshmark covers the remaining 45, as Value Added Resource laid out from Poshmark's own seller update.

Here is the part that catches honest sellers. The fee is not only about obvious hazmat like perfume, nail polish, aerosols, or anything with a lithium battery. It also gets triggered by a reused box that still has an old hazmat label or shipping sticker on it. Your item can be a plain cotton shirt and still get flagged because the box it went in used to hold something regulated.

What to do: before August 1, get in the habit of stripping or fully covering every old label, barcode, and hazmat marking on any box you reuse. It costs nothing and it takes ten seconds, and after July 31 skipping it can cost you 5 dollars a package on Poshmark and the full 50 anywhere USPS is not covering you.

The takeaway

You cannot control whether a marketplace suspends you or when USPS changes a fee, but you can control your own paperwork and your own packing bench. Keep records, spread your sales across platforms, and clean off every reused box before it ships. Building those defensive habits into a real reselling routine is a big part of what we work through inside The Income Lab.