Reselling News: A USPS Coding Error Skipped 22.6 Million Dollars in Postage, and eBay Now Owns Depop

For three months this spring, the machine that checks whether you paid the right postage was not looking. A federal audit published this week put a number on what that cost, and the number cuts both ways for sellers.

The postal system that bills you for underpaid postage went blind in March

The Postal Service runs a program called Automated Package Verification. It compares the weight and dimensions you declared when you bought a label against what its own equipment measures, then charges you the difference or refunds you the overage. It is the reason a padded envelope you called 12 ounces can come back as a postage due adjustment three days later.

APV only trusts measurements from machines on a programmed list. In 2025 the Postal Service started renaming its Automated Parcel Bundle Sorter machines in its data systems, and nobody added the new name to that trusted list. Starting in March 2026, APV lost between 30 million and 50 million scans per week. Those sorters were the workhorse of the program, producing the majority of trusted weights.

The USPS Office of Inspector General flagged it in March. Contractors admitted in May they still had not made what they described as a simple configuration change. It was finally fixed in June. All of this comes from management alert 25-130-2-R26, issued July 29.

The estimated damage, from March through May:

The OIG projects the fix will collect about 96.9 million dollars in postage and issue roughly 36.6 million dollars in refunds between June 2026 and February 2027.

Read that second row again, because that is the seller side of this story. If you overpaid on a label between March and May, the automatic refund that normally lands in your account probably never fired, and the report says nothing about USPS going back to issue them. Nothing in that alert promises a retroactive sweep.

The practical read: verification is back at full strength as of June. If your postage due adjustments picked up this summer and you assumed a platform changed something, it did not. The scale is simply being read again. Weigh and measure the box you are actually shipping, not the one you shipped last time.

eBay closed the Depop deal on July 30

eBay announced on July 30 that it has completed its acquisition of Depop. Depop will run as a complementary business and keep its own brand, platform, customer experience, and culture. eBay put its fashion category at more than 10 billion dollars in annual gross merchandise volume.

Nothing on your listings changes today. What is worth watching is the plumbing. When one company owns both, shipping, compliance, and authentication tooling tends to get shared, and so do policies. If you move Y2K, streetwear, or vintage apparel, Depop just became a channel with a very large parent, and a second look at it is cheaper now than after the integration is finished.

Poshmark hazmat coverage drops tomorrow

Poshmark has been eating the entire 50 dollar USPS hazmat noncompliance fee. That ends with packages postmarked today. From August 1, Poshmark's seller notice puts your share at 5 dollars and keeps 45 on the platform. Old hazmat markings on a recycled box are what trigger it, so black them out before the label goes on.

The takeaway

Two of today's three items are about the boring layer under your business: what the carrier measures and what the platform absorbs. That layer is where thin margins quietly go. Building the habit of tracking it, order by order, is the work we do together inside The Income Lab.

Hero photo by tales of a wandering youkai, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.