Reselling News: Amazon Adds Dangerous Goods Questions to Listing Edits Today, and Texas Sets November 15 for Its Fee Tax Fix

Two things land today. One of them changes what Amazon asks you before it will let you save a listing. The other is a tax rule in a single state that finally has a date attached to it.

Amazon starts asking dangerous goods questions when you edit a listing

As of today, creating or editing an Amazon listing in four specific product groups means answering a new set of dangerous goods compliance questions before the change will go through. EcomCrew laid out the notice and the affected groups, and Amazon's own announcement has been circulating in seller forums since late September.

The four groups are narrower than the phrase "dangerous goods" suggests:

• Refrigerators, freezers and air conditioners, where the questions go to the refrigerant gas
• Shock absorbers and suspension lift supports, where they go to the damping mechanism
• Markers and writing instruments, where they go to the ink
• Pool and spa water treatment chemicals, where they go to composition and packaging

Read that list again if you source lots. Markers and writing instruments is the one that catches ordinary resellers, because a box of art supplies out of an estate sale does not feel like a hazmat listing until Amazon decides it is one. Auto parts people get two of the four.

What matters is the trigger. Nothing happens to a live listing at midnight. The questions appear the next time you touch it, which means the thing that sets this off is a routine edit: a price change, a title fix, a quantity update. You go in to adjust something small and Amazon asks you for technical specifications about a product you bought secondhand and have no datasheet for. If you cannot answer, that edit does not land, and depending on the answer the offer or the inbound shipment can get held up.

What to do: before you touch anything in those four groups, go find out what you are actually selling. The model number on the unit, the manufacturer's safety data sheet where one exists, and the packaging details. Do that now, while you are not under pressure, rather than at the point where a listing is already stuck and a sale is sitting behind it. If none of your catalog touches those groups, this costs you nothing today, and it is still worth knowing that an edit can now open a compliance gate that did not exist last week.

Texas puts a date on the end of the tax on your selling fees

Back on October 11 we covered the executive order directing the Texas Comptroller to pull marketplace fees out of the state's taxable data processing definition. At that point there was no date for any of it. Now there is one.

The amendment to Rule 3.330 was published in the Texas Register on October 16, which started a 30 day comment period that closes November 15. That same date is the earliest the rule can actually be adopted, as the National Law Review explains in its walkthrough of the proposal. The exempting language is broad: fees, commissions or other charges a platform imposes on a seller for listing, offering or facilitating sales, regardless of how the charge is calculated, whether a sale happens, or whether it is billed to you or netted out of your payout.

Here is the part worth your attention. The proposal is prospective only. It says nothing about tax periods before adoption, which leaves open audits, pending disputes and refund claims for everything Texas sellers have already paid unresolved. Value Added Resource has flagged the same gap for sellers tracking this.

What to do if you sell from Texas: keep the tax line in your cost math through November, because nothing is final until it is adopted. Then pull the total you have paid on that line since the rule changed and keep it somewhere you can find it. A refund path may never open, but if one does, the sellers who can produce the number are the ones who collect.

The takeaway

One of these is a gate in front of an edit. The other is a line on an invoice. What they share is that both of them sit outside the part of the business you look at every day, and both of them are cheaper to deal with in advance than in the middle of a sale.

That habit of knowing the paperwork behind your own inventory is the unglamorous half of a business that keeps running when a platform moves. We work through it, piece by piece, inside The Income Lab.

Hero image: the Amazon logo, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.