Reselling News: eBay's New Privacy Policy Covers Your Listing Photos and Mercari's Free Holiday Shipping Starts October 22

Two notices went out this week that most sellers will scroll past. One is a legal document that quietly widens what a marketplace can read and act on inside your account. The other is a shipping promotion that starts Thursday and changes the math on anything you have priced near fifty dollars.

eBay's new privacy notice takes effect November 26

eBay emailed users on October 19 about a global privacy policy update, and Value Added Resource has gone through what actually changed between the old version and the new one. The new User Privacy Notice is already posted on eBay's help pages with an effective date of November 26, 2026.

The part worth your attention is the scope of automated review. The old wording leaned on messages. The new version spells out listings, images, videos, livestream content, comments, transcripts, captions and reports as content that may be reviewed automatically. If you run eBay Live, that now explicitly includes what you say on stream and the transcript of it. eBay also added language letting it limit how much detail it gives about its detection and enforcement systems, which is the opposite direction from sellers asking why a listing got pulled.

Two smaller edits do real work. The carve-out allowing automated decisions moved from ones "required by applicable law" to ones "required or otherwise permitted by applicable law," which is a wider gate for machine-made account actions. And eBay dropped its old promise to tell you about material privacy changes through My Messages or email. Going forward it commits only to posting the revised notice on the site, so nobody is obligated to tap you on the shoulder next time.

On AI, eBay says it leans mainly on publicly available data for training generative models but may use personal data where it decides doing so is necessary and proportionate, naming seller tool data, shopping recommendations and customer support interactions. There is a preference page for this at accountsettings.ebay.com/ai-preferences, and the Artificial Intelligence at eBay help page describes a right to object for some users.

What to do: spend five minutes on the AI preferences page and set it the way you want it, then treat your listing copy, your photos and anything you say on a Live stream as reviewable by machine. That has effectively been true for a while. As of November 26 it is written down.

Mercari is running free shipping on $50 orders from October 22

Mercari told buyers and sellers on October 17 that it is bringing back free holiday shipping, and Value Added Resource has the terms. Orders of fifty dollars or more ship free from October 22, 2026 through January 4, 2027. Single items have to use Mercari's Best Rate prepaid label and stay inside the size limits. Bundles from one seller qualify on any rate or carrier. Both sides of that cap out at five pounds.

The timing is not subtle. Mercari's new prepaid label prices landed on October 19, so the promotion arrives three days after sellers started paying more to ship. Mercari has not said publicly who absorbs the shipping on these orders, which is the one number worth confirming yourself rather than assuming.

Two other things are coming back without dates attached. Fashion Exchange returns, letting buyers swap select clothing, shoes and bags for Mercari credit instead of a refund within 72 hours of delivery, with the seller keeping full payment and picking up an automatic rating. And Mercari plans a paid upgrade called Shipping Protection Plus+ that goes above the current coverage of $200 on standard and economy labels and $20 on First Class Envelopes. Pricing and launch are still unannounced.

What to do: look at your Mercari closet for items sitting at $42 to $48. Between Thursday and January 4, a fifty dollar sticker buys the shipping for your buyer, and that is a better bundle hook than a six percent discount. Then watch your payout on the first qualifying sale so you know exactly where the postage came from.

The takeaway

One of these changes what a platform may do with your words and photos, and the other changes what a buyer pays at checkout. The first costs nothing to adjust today. The second expires January 4.

Reading a policy update for the sentence that actually moves money, and repricing a closet around a promotion window instead of guessing at it, is the kind of work we walk through together inside The Income Lab.

Hero photo by Ben P L, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.