Reselling News: PayPal Retires Seller Profiles July 30 and the Senate Opens an Amazon Probe

Two stories this week are worth a reseller's attention. One is a hard deadline that is six days away and takes ten minutes to handle. The other is a slower-burning investigation in Washington that says something about how much of your business you want sitting inside one company you do not control. Different timelines, same lesson.

PayPal retires Seller Profiles on July 30

If you take PayPal payments outside of a marketplace, this one has a clock on it. PayPal is sunsetting Seller Profiles and replacing them with a new product called Business Profiles, and the old profiles go away on July 30, per PayPal's own Seller Profile Sunset FAQ and reporting from EcommerceBytes.

A Business Profile carries over what the old Seller Profile did, your business details, a pay button, and your public transaction history, and PayPal says it adds more on top. The catch is the handle. If you do not create your Business Profile before July 30, your Seller Profile and the public page tied to it stop working, and when you set up a Business Profile later you may have to take a new handle instead of the one you have been using.

For most of us who sell on eBay, Poshmark, or Mercari, PayPal is not the checkout, so this is not an emergency. But plenty of resellers also take direct payment for local pickups, cross-posted sales off-platform, or a side of flips through a PayPal link, and that link is the handle that is about to change. If that is you, log in before July 30, claim the Business Profile, and keep the handle you already print on invoices and share with repeat buyers. It is a two-minute task that protects a link you may have spread around more than you remember.

Worth noting in the same update: PayPal is also changing its User Agreement and dispute resolution terms this summer, so it is a good week to actually read the notice PayPal sent rather than swipe it away.

The Senate is probing Amazon over Chinese influence

On July 22, Bloomberg reported that the Senate Small Business Committee is investigating possible Chinese manipulation of Amazon, with committee staff saying they found what they called compelling evidence of Amazon negligence, as covered by EcommerceBytes. The thread that pulled the investigation open was an Amazon seller whose account was suspended, who says someone offered to unfreeze it by bribing an Amazon employee.

A congressional probe is not proof of anything, and it may go nowhere. But the detail that should stick with a reseller is the ordinary one buried underneath it: a seller had an account frozen and no clean path to get it back. That is the real risk of building your whole income inside a single marketplace, whether the cause is a policy bot, a bad actor, or a mistake no human ever reviews.

You do not need to quit Amazon or wait on the Senate. You need a business that does not fall over if one platform locks you out for a week. Keep your own records of every sale and payout, do not let a large balance pile up inside one account, and list across more than one channel so a single freeze slows you down instead of shutting you off.

The takeaway

Claim your PayPal Business Profile before July 30 so you keep your handle, and treat the Amazon story as one more reason not to keep all of your inventory, cash, and customers behind one company's login. Owning your records and spreading your sales across platforms is a core habit we build step by step inside The Income Lab.