Reselling News: Poshmark Starts Taking Overweight Label Costs Out of Your Earnings, and eBay Widens Automated Monitoring on November 26

A subsidy you probably never noticed ended yesterday, and it only shows up in your numbers if you ship anything heavy. The second item on today's list is slower, but it decides what an automated system is allowed to look at inside your eBay account.

Poshmark stopped absorbing the cost of your heavy packages

As of October 26, shipping a Poshmark package over 5 lbs without upgrading the label first means the upgrade cost comes out of your earnings. Poshmark laid out the tiers in its October 8 blog post, and Value Added Resource covered the shift when it was announced.

The numbers are simple enough to memorize:

• 5.01 to 10 lbs costs $5
• 10.01 to 15 lbs costs $10
• 15.01 to 25 lbs costs $15
• Over 25 lbs costs you the full USPS rate

Here is what actually changed. Those upgrade prices are not new. What is new is that Poshmark used to quietly cover the difference when a seller shipped heavy without buying the upgrade, and now it does not. If you have been shipping 7 lb packages on a standard label and nothing ever happened, that was the subsidy working. Starting now the same behavior costs you five dollars a package.

The categories that cross 5 lbs are the ones people underestimate: winter coats, boots, handbags with hardware, and above all bundles. A buyer pulls four items into one bundle and you are suddenly packing a box you never weighed when you priced any of the four pieces individually.

What to do: put a scale next to where you pack and weigh the box, not the item. A coat that reads 3 lbs on a hanger reads 5.4 lbs in a poly mailer with the mailer and the tissue and the thank you card. Then buy the upgrade before you ship rather than letting it get taken afterward, because the deduction is the same money with none of the control. And if you list heavy categories, reprice them. A $28 coat with a $5 upgrade is a different item than a $28 coat was last week.

eBay widens what its automated systems watch on November 26

eBay is updating its global privacy notice on November 26, and the expansion is worth reading before it lands. Value Added Resource walked through the changes line by line.

Three pieces matter to a seller. First, automated monitoring now explicitly covers listings, images, videos, livestreams, comments, transcripts, captions and reports, where the old language was mostly about messages. Second, eBay says it may use seller personal data for AI model training where it considers that necessary and proportionate, and the opt out page is still labeled for the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, with no clear answer for US sellers. Third, and the quietest of the three, eBay removed its promise to notify registered users of material changes through My Messages. Going forward, changes get posted to the site and that is the notice.

There is also a line reserving the right to limit how much detail eBay provides about its detection, moderation and enforcement systems. Pair that with automated decisions that can affect an account and you get the practical shape of it: more of your selling activity is machine reviewed, and less of how that review works will be explained to you.

What to do: nothing dramatic, and nothing panicked. Keep your own records outside the platform. Save your listing photos and descriptions somewhere you control, keep a copy of any policy notice that touches your account, and stop relying on My Messages as your alert system for rule changes. If a listing gets pulled by something automated, the seller who can show what the listing actually said is in a far better position than the seller reconstructing it from memory.

The takeaway

One of these takes five dollars at a time out of packages you already shipped. The other decides how much of your business a machine reads and how little it has to tell you about it. Neither one announces itself in your sales numbers, which is exactly why they are worth an hour of attention now.

Building a business that absorbs a fee change without flinching is a different skill than finding good inventory, and it is the one we work on together inside The Income Lab.

Hero image: the Poshmark logo, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.