Reselling News: Amazon Product Tags Land on YouTube and eBay Ends Private Seller Fees in France and Italy

None of this week's news changes what you pay on your next sale. All of it changes where the money around reselling is moving, and one item opens a second income line for anyone already pointing a camera at their inventory.

Amazon products can now be tagged inside YouTube videos

On August 27, YouTube added Amazon to its Shopping affiliate program for eligible US creators. The announcement, written by YouTube shopping lead Travis Katz, says those creators can tag Amazon products in Shorts, long-form videos, and livestreams, and earn a commission when a viewer buys through the tag. TechCrunch covered the rollout the same day. Creators can pick items from a curated catalog themselves or switch on auto-tagging and let YouTube match products to the channel. Getting paid requires two things at once: enrollment in YouTube's Shopping affiliate program and an active Amazon Associates or Influencer account linked to the channel.

What to do about it: if you already film sourcing runs, hauls, or gear talk, the supplies you use on camera are the first honest tags. Poly mailers, a thermal label printer, a shipping scale, a light kit. Those are things you actually bought and can speak to, which is the only version of affiliate income that survives contact with an audience. Do not flip on auto-tagging and walk away. A product tag you did not choose still runs under your name, and a bad one costs you more trust than the commission is worth.

eBay stopped charging private sellers in France and Italy and started charging buyers

On September 1, eBay flipped the fee model in two more European markets. Value Added Resource documented the change: private sellers registered in the European Economic Area now pay no final value fee and no regulatory operating fee on eBay.fr and eBay.it, and they get 150 free listings a month with extra listings at 0.35 euro each. The revenue moves to the buyer through a buyer protection fee that starts at 0.10 euro per item, then adds 7 percent of the first 20 euros, 4 percent from 20.01 to 300 euros, and 2 percent from 300.01 to 4,000 euros, with no percentage above that. eBay also widened its fashion authentication to those two sites, routing eligible clothing, shoes, handbags, and sneakers priced over 200 euros through its German authentication center before the item reaches the buyer.

What to do about it: nothing today, and that is the point of reading it anyway. US sellers are not affected, and US buyers are not charged this fee. eBay's own buyer protection fee help page still scopes the charge to items from private sellers registered in the UK. What you are watching is a model spreading market by market: the casual seller lists free, the buyer covers the cost, and the platform keeps its take either way. It has now run in the UK and Germany long enough to stop being an experiment. If it ever crosses the Atlantic, the sellers who already know their true cost per sale will adjust in an afternoon, and the ones who priced by feel will spend a quarter guessing.

The card price guide arrived in the UK, and it is already free here

eBay launched its trading card price guide in the UK on September 1, letting collectors scan a card with a phone camera and pull real completed sales. The US version has been out since eBay's June seller news, which says the tool is available to all US sellers in the eBay app. Open the app, go to My eBay, tap Scan cards. eBay's price guide page says scanning and viewing pricing insights are free with no usage limits, covering sports cards plus Pokemon, Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, One Piece, and Disney Lorcana, with up to two years of sales history and PSA and CGC population data.

What to do about it: use it in the store, not at the desk. The whole value of a scanner is that it answers the buy question while you are still standing in front of the box. Cards are the category where a free comp tool changes decisions fastest, because the spread between two versions of the same card is invisible to the naked eye.

The takeaway

A camera, a fee schedule, and a scanner. Three different tools, one habit underneath them, which is knowing your numbers before someone else sets them for you. That habit is what we drill inside The Income Lab.

Hero photo by BrokenSphere, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.