Reselling News
Reselling News: A Second 3-5 lb Postage Hike Lands and eBay Told Sellers Two Days Late
USPS raised Ground Advantage rates on 3-5 lb packages in zones 5 through 8 effective August 8, and eBay posted the notice two days after sellers were already paying it.
If you shipped a four pound package across the country over the weekend, you paid more for it than you expected, and nobody told you until Monday morning. That is the whole story this week, and it is worth two minutes of your attention because it lands on the exact weight band where most of our heavier flips live.
The 3-5 lb band moved again, and this time it is dollars
Ground Advantage prices went up on Monday, August 8, for packages weighing three to five pounds. The increase is not flat across the map. Zone 5 went up one dollar. Zones 6, 7, and 8 went up two dollars each. Zones 1 through 4 were left alone, according to Value Added Resource, which also captured eBay's wording that the change covers "select Ground Advantage shipments, including those purchased through eBay Labels."
The notice went up on the eBay announcement board around 11 in the morning Eastern on August 10. The rates had already been live for two days. So anyone who sold a heavier item over the weekend, printed a label, and moved on was quoted the new price without any heads up that it had changed.
Put this next to what happened in late July, when the same three to five pound band went up a dime across every zone. Ten cents was a rounding error. Two dollars is not. On a distance sale, that is often the difference between a flip that cleared twelve dollars and one that cleared ten.
What to do about it: the zone is now the variable that matters most on anything over three pounds. A four pound pair of boots going two states over costs what it cost last week. The same boots going to California cost two dollars more. If you offer free shipping and bury the cost in your price, price your heavier listings for the far zones, not the near ones, because you do not get to choose where the buyer lives. Pull the live number out of the shipping calculator before you list rather than trusting the figure you memorized in June.
Why the rate keeps moving mid year
The Postal Service reported its third quarter results on August 7, covering April through June. It posted a net loss of 2.5 billion dollars, an improvement on the 3.1 billion dollar loss in the same quarter a year earlier. Operating revenue came in at 19.9 billion dollars, up 6.1 percent. Controllable loss, the piece management can actually steer, was 1.0 billion dollars against 1.6 billion a year ago.
Read that honestly and it is a mixed picture. Revenue is growing and the hole is getting smaller. The hole is also still measured in billions every ninety days.
That is the context for why we now get these narrow adjustments to one weight band and a handful of zones in the middle of the year instead of one predictable increase every January. Targeted moves are the lever being pulled, and the packages resellers ship sit right in the middle of the range being targeted.
What to do about it: stop treating postage as a fixed cost you learned once. Treat it the way you treat a sold comp, something you look up fresh when it matters. On anything over three pounds, that means checking the rate the day you list, not the day you learned the number.
The takeaway
Two dollars sounds like nothing until you count how many heavy items you send to the far half of the country in a month. Reprice your three to five pound listings for zone 8 and let the near zones be the bonus. If you want the rest of the shipping math worked out with you, including how to price heavier items so postage never eats the profit, that is the kind of thing we go through together inside The Income Lab.
Hero photo by Pfc. Sullivan Laramie, U.S. Marine Corps, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
