Reselling News: eBay Label QR Codes Stopped Scanning at the Post Office

The first item this week is the kind of problem you discover while standing at the counter with a bin of packages and a line behind you. The other two move slower, and both of them shift who carries the risk when something goes wrong.

eBay QR codes stopped working at the post office

On Thursday, August 13, sellers started reporting that QR codes generated through eBay for USPS labels would not scan at the post office. The clerk scans it, the system says no label exists, and the package goes home with you. EcommerceBytes reported the outage along with an eBay moderator's acknowledgment that the product team was aware and working on a fix to roll out as soon as possible.

The advice from eBay's own customer service was to stop canceling and repurchasing the label, which is exactly what most of us do on instinct when a scan fails. A shipping veteran in the same thread pointed out that there is sometimes an API lag of about an hour between buying a label and it being scannable, and that waiting until the next day can clear it up on its own. The warning attached to that is the part worth writing down: once a label reads as scanned, USPS will not refund it, so a stack of canceled and rebought labels can turn into money you do not get back.

What to do about it: print the label. A QR code is convenient right up until the day it is not, and a paper label taped to the box does not depend on eBay's servers talking to the counter scanner in real time. If you are committed to the QR workflow, buy your postage the night before rather than on the way out the door, and if a code fails, walk out with the package instead of repurchasing on the spot.

Amazon made arbitration mandatory again

On August 14, Amazon updated its Conditions of Use and its Prime Terms and Conditions to require individual arbitration for most disputes and to waive class actions. The company's language is that most legal disputes will be resolved through individual arbitration rather than in court by a judge or jury, and that the agreement does not apply to litigation already pending before August 14. Small claims court is still open. EcommerceBytes has the breakdown, and Value Added Resource covered the reversal, noting Amazon had dropped these same clauses back in 2021 after a wave of mass arbitration claims.

There is no opt-out form. Continued use of the service is the agreement, and Prime members who do not accept it are told to cancel.

This is buyer-side terms, not the seller agreement, but plenty of us are Amazon buyers on the sourcing side. If you buy inventory, supplies, or equipment there, your realistic remedies for a bad order are now the return window, the A-to-z guarantee, your card issuer, and small claims. That makes the boring habits matter more: keep the order confirmation, photograph what shows up damaged the day it shows up, and file inside the return window rather than letting a problem age out while you wait for a reply.

eBay Consignment is showing an error page

The Linda's Stuff story got a second chapter. Poshmark acquired the consignment operation on August 3, and this week EcommerceBytes found the eBay Consignment service returning an error page with no public statement from eBay almost two weeks after the deal was announced. Linda Lightman put it plainly on Instagram, saying that after 25 years on eBay they had moved houses and were now on Poshmark.

For a small seller this is mostly a read on where high-end fashion volume is heading, and it is a reminder that a service you route inventory through can disappear with no notice from the platform that offered it. Anything you cannot see and touch is somebody else's inventory system, and their business decisions become your problem on their timeline.

The takeaway

The through line this week is control. A label that lives on somebody's server, a dispute path that somebody else defines, a consignment pipeline that somebody else can sell. None of the three is a crisis on its own, and all three get cheaper to absorb when your own process is tight enough that a bad day costs you an hour instead of a week. Building that process, one boring repeatable step at a time, is what we work on together inside The Income Lab.

Hero photo by Tony Webster, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.