Reselling News: Poshmark Stops Covering the $50 USPS HAZMAT Fee October 19, and eBay's Currency Conversion Charge Rises to 3.25 Percent

Most of the boxes stacked in your garage came from somebody else first. Starting tomorrow, one leftover marking on one of them can cost you fifty dollars on a Poshmark sale.

Poshmark stops absorbing the $50 hazmat fee on October 19

USPS began charging a $50 hazardous materials noncompliance fee on July 12, 2026. Poshmark paid the whole thing for sellers at first, then on August 1 moved $5 of it onto the seller while absorbing the other $45. That cushion disappears October 19, Value Added Resource reported. From that date a flagged package takes the full $50 out of your earnings.

Poshmark's own notice is direct about where most of these charges come from: "It's reusing a box that still has old hazmat labels or markings." The thing to hunt for is the small black and white Limited Quantity diamond printed on packaging for beauty products, aerosols and cleaning supplies. Items can also trigger the fee on their own, and the usual suspects in a resale closet are perfume, nail polish, aerosols and electronics with lithium batteries inside.

So the habit to build this week costs nothing. Before you tape a reused box shut, turn it over and check all six sides for a diamond or a hazard label, then black it out or cover it completely. If you are not sure what you are looking at, Poshmark's advice is the cheap one: grab a new box or a poly mailer instead. A fifty cent mailer against a fifty dollar fee is not a close call.

One more thing worth holding onto. The fee belongs to USPS, not to Poshmark. What changes on Sunday is only who pays it. Whether any other platform is still covering it on your behalf is that platform's decision, not a protection you should assume you have.

eBay's currency conversion charge is now 3.25 percent

The quieter item this week. eBay raised its seller currency conversion charge on October 14 for sellers registered in the US and Canada, from 3 percent to 3.25 percent. eBay's selling fees page now lists the charge for US registered sellers at 3.25 percent. Other markets follow on their own dates: Australia on November 1, the UK moving from 2.5 to 2.75 percent on December 1, and Germany, France, Italy and Spain on December 2.

This one only reaches you when eBay converts currency on your behalf, which happens when you sell across eBay sites in a currency other than your account's. A quarter of a percentage point is small by design. On $2,000 of converted proceeds across a year it is five dollars, and that is exactly why it is worth naming out loud. Increases this size are built to pass unnoticed, and they land on top of the international selling fee you are already paying on the same order.

If a real share of your sales ship overseas, go pull your last three payout statements and find the conversion line. Not to panic over it, just to know the number, because you cannot tell whether international selling is still worth your time if you have never added up what the plumbing costs.

The takeaway

Neither of these is a headline that will change your week. Both are the same quiet thing: a cost that used to sit on the platform now sits on you, and nobody is going to send you a reminder. The sellers who stay profitable through a year of small changes like these are the ones who already know what a package costs them to send and what a sale actually nets, so a $50 fee or a quarter point never gets to hide. Building that habit, line by line, is the work we do together inside The Income Lab.

Hero image: photo by Meanwell Packaging, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.