Reselling News: eBay Hides Non-Standard Apparel Sizes in August and a 50 Percent Canada Tariff Hits Cross-Border Sellers

If you sell clothing on eBay, you have a few days left to fix something that can quietly make your listings disappear. That is the item worth acting on today. Two others in the news this week are worth knowing about, one because it changes costs for anyone shipping across the border and one because it closes a six-year story that started with a reporter covering this exact business.

eBay starts hiding unclear apparel and footwear sizes in August

eBay has been rolling out standardized sizing for Apparel and Footwear since June. Where a size mapped cleanly, eBay converted it on its own, so "small" became "S". Where it did not map, eBay flagged the listing and left it to the seller. Starting in August, listings with missing or unclear size values may be hidden until they are updated. eBay lays out the change and the timeline on its own Seller Center item specifics page, and Value Added Resource has been tracking what sellers are running into.

The values eBay accepts are alpha sizes like 2XS, XS, S, M, L, XL and XXL, numeric sizes where the category uses them, and region-specific formats for US, UK and EU. The entries that get flagged are the ones most of us have typed at some point. A blank size field. "See description." "N/A." Two or three sizes crammed into one field as "S/M/L."

One thing worth being clear on, because it is causing confusion. This applies to the Size item specific only. Your title and your description can still say whatever describes the item best. eBay is standardizing the structured field that search and filters actually read, which is why a non-standard value costs you visibility in the first place. A buyer filtering to size L never sees a listing whose size field says "see description."

Sellers with large apparel inventories are the ones feeling this. A seller in eBay's community with more than 2,000 listings asked how to handle the update in bulk, and another pointed out that extended bra sizing is not fully covered by the accepted values, which risks returns when a buyer picks the closest available option instead of the real one.

What to do: open active listings in Seller Hub, filter or sort your apparel and footwear, and find anything with a blank or odd size value. Fix those first. If you list a handful of items a week, this is a twenty-minute job. If you have a few thousand listings, use a file upload rather than clicking through one at a time, and start with your best sellers so the listings that earn get protected first.

A 50 percent tariff on some Canadian goods lands in mid-August

On July 20 the White House signed proclamations imposing 50 percent tariffs on a set of Canadian goods under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a provision that has sat unused for close to a century. The tariffs take effect 30 days from the proclamation, which puts them in the third week of August. Al Jazeera covered the scope, and Value Added Resource covered what it means for online sellers specifically.

The covered list runs to roughly 20 billion dollars of imports and includes categories resellers actually touch: clothing, furniture, sporting goods, toys, handbags, household products, and collectibles including art, antiques and stamps. Oil, gas, critical minerals and potash are exempt, along with goods already hit by sector-specific tariffs.

What to do: this only matters if you are shipping from Canada into the US, or sourcing from Canada. If that is you, check with your cross-border shipping service before mid-August and confirm how it is calculating the new duty and who is on the hook for it. Do not assume the platform handles it. If you sell domestically, this is background noise, and you can skip it.

eBay settles the Steiner cyberstalking case for 55.7 million dollars

On July 27, eBay and several former executives settled the civil case brought by David and Ina Steiner, the couple behind the reseller news site EcommerceBytes, over the 2019 harassment campaign aimed at stopping their coverage of the company. EcommerceBytes reported the terms: 48.7 million dollars in compensation, with eBay paying 46.15 million and former executives contributing personally, plus 6 million to nonprofits and no confidentiality restrictions on the Steiners.

There is nothing here to act on. It is worth noting anyway. The independent coverage that tells sellers a fee is changing before the platform gets around to announcing it comes from small outlets like that one. Reading more than the official seller newsletter is part of the job.

The takeaway

The size fields are the one thing on this list that can cost you money this week, and they are the one thing fully in your control. Go clean them up before August. Knowing which headline is yours to act on and which is background is the same skill as knowing which item is worth buying, and we build both step by step inside The Income Lab.