Reselling News: Some USPS Rates on eBay Drop August 22 and Amazon Hides Most of Its Reviews

Postage news almost always moves in one direction. This week a small piece of it moved the other way, and the second story is about what a buyer can actually see before they decide to trust you.

Some eBay label rates go down on Friday

eBay posted the notice to its community announcements board on August 19. Effective August 22, 2026, USPS is making rate adjustments that mean lower shipping costs for select Ground Advantage and Priority Mail shipments. The slice is narrow and specific: Ground Advantage rates decrease for 2 lb packages across Zones 1 through 8, and Priority Mail rates decrease for packages up to 10 lb going to Zone 8. Rural ZIP Codes are excluded. Nothing is required of you, since the eBay shipping calculator updates itself when the rates take effect.

There is one thing missing from the announcement, and it matters. eBay published no dollar amounts and no percentages. Value Added Resource points out that adjustments like this one most likely come out of eBay's negotiated contract with USPS rather than a published USPS price change, which is why there is no public rate table you can hold it up against. EcommerceBytes covered the same notice. It also follows a Ground Advantage increase that eBay put in place on August 8 and told sellers about two days after the fact.

What to do about it: do not rebuild your pricing around a decrease nobody will quantify. Do something smaller and more useful instead. Buy a label for your next 2 lb Ground Advantage order after Friday, then pull up what the same weight and zone cost you last week and write both numbers down. That comparison is the only figure that exists, because eBay did not print one. If you offer free shipping on items in that weight band, this is where the difference lands in your pocket rather than the buyer's.

Amazon is capping some shoppers at eight reviews per item

Jared Newman at Fast Company reported on August 3 that Amazon has been limiting some shoppers to eight customer reviews per product after its anti-scraping systems flag them as bots. Shoppers who ask for the limit to be lifted get told the wait can run up to five days, and at least one was informed by a chat agent that he had violated Amazon's conditions of use on data gathering. Amazon confirmed it is trying to restrict unauthorized data scraping on the site, and declined to say when the restriction started, how many people it has hit, or what behavior sets it off. EcommerceBytes picked it up on August 16 and put the seller side of it on the record.

What to do about it: a lot of resellers use Amazon reviews as a sourcing check, scanning for whether a brand runs small or a model has a known defect before committing money to a pallet or a shelf pull. If you are one of the flagged accounts, the handful of reviews you can still read are not a representative sample of anything, and reading fewer of them feels exactly the same as reading all of them. Treat Amazon reviews as a hint and let eBay sold listings carry the actual demand and price question. If you sell on Amazon yourself, the math got harsher in a quieter way, because one angry review does far more damage when it is one of eight visible instead of one of four hundred.

The takeaway

Both stories are about the same thing from opposite ends. eBay will not publish the new rates and Amazon will not show all the reviews, so the data you would normally lean on to make a decision has thinned out. The counter is boring and it works: keep your own records. Your label receipts, your sold prices, and your buy costs cannot be restated or hidden by anyone, and after a few months they are a better read on your business than anything a platform posts. Setting up that record keeping so it takes minutes a week instead of a Sunday afternoon is one of the first things we work through inside The Income Lab.

Hero photo by tales of a wandering youkai, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.