Reselling News: eBay's USPS Rates Change Again Today and the EU Requires a Product ID November 1

Three things land in the next 48 hours, and two of them will quietly change what a package costs you. The third one decides who owns your listing photos.

The Ground Advantage increase that was supposed to hit October 25 lands today instead

eBay posted a notice on October 22 saying USPS was adjusting Ground Advantage rates on October 25. That notice has since been edited. The announcement in eBay's seller forum now reads that USPS is increasing some Ground Advantage rates on October 30, with the body updated on October 27. Today is October 30.

Two details are worth sitting with. First, it is not a flat hike. eBay describes a mix of increases and decreases depending on weight, zone, and destination, which means two parcels of the same weight going to different parts of the country can move in opposite directions. Second, if you use calculated shipping, eBay updates the buyer-facing price for you and you will never see it happen. If you sell free shipping, nobody updates anything. The new cost comes straight out of your margin on every listing you already have live.

This is the third Ground Advantage rate adjustment to reach eBay Labels since July, after a ten cent increase on July 25 and a larger one on three to five pound parcels on August 8. It sits on top of the geographic rate groups that took effect October 18 and the USPS peak season surcharge running from October 4 through January 17.

What to do: pull up three or four of your actual free-shipping listings today, price a real label to a zone 7 or 8 address, and compare it against the shipping cost you assumed when you listed them. If the gap is more than a dollar, that is not a rounding error on a stack of 200 listings. Fix the free-shipping items first, because those are the ones absorbing the whole change.

Every parcel into the EU needs a product identifier starting Sunday

From November 1, the EU requires product identifier data on all items shipped from outside the EU to an EU buyer, with no value threshold. eBay's seller page on the requirement lists three accepted types: the eBay listing ID, a manufacturer code such as an MPN, or a standardized code such as a GTIN, UPC, EAN, or ISBN.

That reads fine until you remember what most of us sell. Value Added Resource flagged the obvious hole: older clothing, vintage collectibles, replacement parts, and one-off secondhand goods often carry no manufacturer identifier whatsoever. eBay's guidance tells sellers to search online for the code, and does not say what to enter when the code has never existed. Missing data can mean delayed customs clearance or a parcel that does not move.

What to do: if you are enrolled in eBay International Shipping, go fill in brand and MPN on anything that genuinely has them, because that is free protection. For true vintage and one-off items where no code exists, the honest read right now is that nobody has told us the answer yet. Watch your international orders through the first week of November instead of assuming the label will clear, and be ready to refund a stuck parcel rather than eat a case.

Etsy is taking the right to train AI on your listings

Etsy updated its Terms of Use and Privacy Policy to let Etsy and authorized third parties use seller-uploaded content to train AI models, effective December 16. The same update bars sellers from using Etsy content to train or prompt AI without permission. Value Added Resource read the new terms closely and found no general mechanism for a US seller to opt their listing photos and descriptions out of training while continuing to sell there.

What to do: this is not a reason to leave Etsy, but it is a reason to stop treating your photos as yours alone once they are uploaded. Shoot and keep your originals locally. If you have product photography you genuinely consider an asset, think about which platform sees it first.

What ties the three together

A shipping rate, a customs field, and a terms update do not look like the same story. They are. Each one moves a cost or a right off the platform and onto the person doing the listing, and each one arrives as a paragraph most sellers scroll past on a Friday.

Reading these notices for what they actually do to your margin, and knowing which ones deserve a response the same day, is the habit we build together inside The Income Lab.