Reselling News: eBay's USPS Rates Change October 25 With No Rate Chart and Amazon Reassigns Fee Categories October 31

Two of the numbers that decide your margin move this week, and neither one of them lives on your listing page. One is the price of a label. The other is the cut Amazon takes off the top.

eBay's negotiated USPS rates change tomorrow, and nobody will tell you by how much

On October 22 eBay notified sellers that its negotiated USPS Ground Advantage rates change on October 25. Value Added Resource has the notice and the context.

What the notice did not include: dollar amounts, weight-based tables, or a rate chart of any kind. That is under three days of warning and no way to price a label until the new rates actually load. eBay's own wording more or less concedes the point, saying that with rates changing so often it can be difficult to know what to expect from one shipment to the next.

This also lands exactly one week after the October 18 geographic pricing change that pulled thousands of ZIP codes into higher pricing groups. Some sellers are getting their second shipping cost change in eight days.

The other half of the story is what tells you this is now the normal state of things. On October 20 Pirate Ship said it is going to stop sending routine rate change alerts, explaining that carriers are starting to change rates multiple times per week. It will still flag major service changes, peak season increases and holiday deadlines. When the shipping software gives up on announcing every price move, the price move has stopped being an event.

What to do: stop trusting any shipping number you are carrying around in your head. Before you set a flat shipping price or lean on a calculated rate for anything heavy this week, pull the real label price to the real ZIP. If you have free shipping items priced off a rate you learned in September, start your recheck there, because those are the ones where the increase comes straight out of your side.

Amazon moves some ASINs into new fee categories October 31

Different platform, same shape of problem. Amazon is reassigning certain ASINs to different fee categories effective October 31, with affected sellers notified starting around October 13. beBOLD Digital reported it first.

Be clear on what a fee category actually is, because it is not the category a shopper browses. Your listing, your title, your photos and your browse placement can all stay exactly as they are while the referral fee charged on every sale changes underneath them. Amazon uses the fee category to calculate referral fees, and can use it for closing fees, FBA fulfillment and returns processing as well.

Here is the honest limit on this one. Amazon has not published a public list of what is moving, so there is no way to tell from the outside whether your catalog is in it. You have to go look.

Where you look is the Fee Preview report in Seller Central. Amazon built that report to show each ASIN's current fee category alongside any scheduled change, which makes it the one place the October 31 move is visible before it starts costing you anything. If a reassignment looks wrong, there is a dispute process, and it goes better when you bring the ASIN, the old and new categories, the product attributes and the specific Amazon fee-category guidance you believe applies.

What to do: open Fee Preview this week rather than in November. A category move you catch on October 29 is a dispute you can file. The same move caught in December is a month of sales already charged at the new rate.

The takeaway

Neither of these touches your listings. Both change what you keep when something sells. The sellers who get hurt here are the ones running on numbers they learned a month ago, and in both cases the fix is the same short habit: check the live number before you commit to the price.

Working out which items can absorb a shipping increase and which ones quietly stop being worth listing at all is the kind of math we go through together inside The Income Lab.

Hero image: the United States Postal Service logo, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.