Reselling News: Mercari Splits the New USPS Hazmat Fee and eBay Settles the Steiner Case

The cheapest box in your garage is the one somebody already shipped to you. Starting this fall, that box can also cost you 25 dollars on a single order, and the reason has nothing to do with what you put inside it.

Mercari will cover half of the 50 dollar hazmat fee, and no more

USPS added a 50 dollar hazardous materials noncompliance fee that took effect July 12. It applies to commercial shipments that are improperly declared, improperly labeled, or otherwise out of step with hazmat rules. EcommerceBytes flagged in early July that the fee would catch sellers off guard, and Poshmark confirmed the July 12 start date in its own seller notice.

The part that catches ordinary resellers is not shipping perfume or lithium batteries. It is reusing a box that still carries a hazmat diamond or a limited quantity marking on the side. The item inside is a t-shirt. The label says flammable liquid. USPS reads the outside of the package.

Marketplaces are landing in very different places on who absorbs that 50 dollars. Value Added Resource reported on July 29 that Mercari will split the fee down the middle, leaving the seller with 25 dollars on any package flagged beginning September 1. Poshmark took the softer route and is covering 45 of the 50 dollars once its full coverage ends July 31, so its sellers pay 5.

Two platforms, the same postal fee, a five to one difference in what it costs you. That gap is worth knowing before you decide which channel a reused box goes out on.

The fix is boring and takes ten seconds. Before a recycled box gets a shipping label, black out or tear off every old hazmat marking, including the small ones near the seam. If the marking is printed into the cardboard and will not cover cleanly, that box is scrap. Buying a plain box is cheaper than one flagged package.

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 over the 2019 campaign of harassment aimed at stopping their reporting. EcommerceBytes published the terms: 48.7 million dollars in compensation, of which 46.15 million comes from eBay, plus 6 million in charitable contributions funded by the company. Former chief executive Devin Wenig is paying 2 million personally and another 1 million to a First Amendment charity named for Ina Steiner. The agreement carries no confidentiality restrictions, which is why the numbers are public at all.

This one does not change a setting in your seller hub. It is worth two minutes anyway, because the Steiners run EcommerceBytes, and EcommerceBytes is one of the handful of outlets that reports fee changes and policy shifts before a platform gets around to emailing you. The case took six years and started with a marketplace trying to silence the people covering it. The practical lesson for a seller is that your early warning system is the independent press, not the announcements tab.

If you sell into the UK, read the August 10 agreement

Separately, eBay is updating its UK user agreement effective August 10 with new sections on eBay International Shipping, eBay Live, and comparative pricing, per Value Added Resource. The comparative pricing language bars claims that fall outside eBay's pricing policy, which is aimed at the fake strikethrough habit of listing an invented original price next to your real one. Only UK accounts are covered right now, but the direction of travel is clear enough that inventing a was price is a bad idea on any platform.

The takeaway

Fee changes do not always arrive looking like fees. This one arrives as a marking on a free box. Treating supplies, packaging, and shipping choices as real line items instead of afterthoughts is exactly the kind of work we go through step by step inside The Income Lab.