Reselling News: Depop and Spotify Team Up While USPS Loses Another 2.5 Billion Dollars

Two things happened this week that pull in opposite directions for a small reseller. One platform spent money bringing new shoppers to secondhand clothing, and the carrier that moves most of our packages reported another quarter deep in the red. Both change how you should be thinking about the back half of the year.

Depop bought attention from Spotify

On August 12, Depop and Spotify launched a joint campaign built around six artist-curated shops. Eve, Amira Elfeky, Estevie, Frost Children, House of Protection, and Lily Meola each listed a set of pieces pulled from their own closets, paired with a Spotify playlist and a two-day event at the Hollywood Premiere Motel in Los Angeles on August 13 and 14. Music Ally has the rundown, and WWD broke the announcement.

The numbers underneath the campaign matter more than the celebrity closets. Depop reports about seven million active buyers, with close to 90 percent of them under 34, and more than three million active sellers. That is a young audience being handed a reason to open the app during a slow retail month.

The move for you: this is a traffic story, not a policy story, so nobody has to change a setting. If you already sit on Y2K, streetwear, band tees, vintage denim, or anything that reads as a style rather than a size, Depop is the app spending money to bring shoppers in right now. Get those items listed there this week while the campaign is still running rather than in October when the attention has moved on. Just remember Depop's audience is thrifting for a look, so your title and your photos have to sell the vibe, not the measurements.

USPS lost 2.5 billion dollars and moved fewer packages

The Postal Service reported its third quarter results on August 7, covering April through June. Net loss came in at 2.5 billion dollars, an improvement on the 3.1 billion dollar loss a year earlier. Operating revenue rose 6.1 percent to 19.9 billion dollars, and the controllable loss narrowed to 1.0 billion dollars.

Read one line further and you find the part that hits a reseller's margin. Shipping and packages brought in 8.25 billion dollars on 1.554 billion pieces, and that piece count fell by 55 million, down 3.4 percent from a year ago. Revenue climbed while volume shrank. That gap is price per package, and you are the one paying it. Postmaster General David Steiner said plainly that the agency still faces a severe liquidity crisis, and USPS deferred roughly 1.4 billion dollars in pension contributions during the quarter.

What that means for your pricing: assume postage keeps going up, because a carrier losing money on falling volume has exactly one lever it controls. We already got a Ground Advantage increase on August 8, the second bump on the 3.5 pound band this year. Reprice the heavy end of your inventory against today's rates, not the rates you memorized in the spring, and quote free shipping only on items where you have run the current number.

The takeaway

Cheap attention and expensive shipping are both on the table this month, and they favor the same kind of inventory. Light, stylish, small-box items ride a demand wave without getting eaten by a postage hike. Heavy items do the opposite. Choosing what to buy with both of those facts in hand is the difference between a busy fall and a profitable one, and that decision framework is what we build together inside The Income Lab.