Reselling News: USPS Rates Rise on eBay Labels Today and eBay's Seller VP Is Gone

If you built a listing last night and let the calculator quote the postage, the label you promised the buyer is not the label you will buy this afternoon. The rates moved at the start of today, and sellers found out about it yesterday morning.

The postage under your active listings went up this morning

eBay's Seller News Team posted the notice on September 18: "The United States Postal Service is making rate adjustments for select Ground Advantage and Priority Mail shipments effective September 19, 2026."

The numbers, straight from that announcement:

• Ground Advantage, 0 to 2 pounds: up 10 cents across zones 1 through 8.
• Ground Advantage, 3 to 5 pounds: up between 27 cents and $2.28 across zones 1 through 8.
• Priority Mail, packages up to 10 pounds going to zone 8: up between 73 cents and $4.35.
• Priority Mail flat rate packages: up 30 cents across zones 1 through 8.

Rural ZIP codes are carved out and do not see the increase. eBay's shipping calculator updated itself when the rates took effect, so a buyer loading one of your listings right now sees the new figure whether or not you have looked at it.

Value Added Resource called out the notice period, and the notice period is the story. One business day is not enough time to reprice a closet. It is barely enough time to read the post.

Your move: the 3 to 5 pound band is where this actually hurts, because that is where the top of the range sits. A heavy hoodie, a pair of boots, a stack of books. If the buyer pays calculated shipping, your listing simply got more expensive to buy and your margin is intact. If you offered free shipping, you absorb every cent of it on items you priced weeks ago. Sort your active listings by weight, look at everything from three pounds up that ships free, and decide today whether the price still works. And keep the calendar in front of you, because the USPS peak season rates are the bigger hit and they start October 4.

eBay's buyer and seller VP left on Friday

The second item is not something you do anything about, but it is worth filing away. Value Added Resource reported that Blair Ethington, eBay's VP of Buyer, Seller and C2C, announced on LinkedIn that Friday, September 18 was the last day at the company. No next step was named.

That role was created in November 2025 and covered the whole span from buyer experience through the seller side and the consumer to consumer push. Ethington had been back at eBay since January 2023. The timing is what makes people notice: the slot at eBay Open UK's senior leadership Q and A two days earlier was filled by CEO Jamie Iannone instead.

Your move: read it as a weather report, not an alarm. eBay has spent this year moving weight toward consumer to consumer selling and Live, and the person who held the business seller half of that portfolio is now gone with no announced replacement. Nothing in your account changes tomorrow. What it should reinforce is the habit of not letting one marketplace's internal reorganization decide your quarter. If every item you own lives in exactly one place, a roadmap you do not control is running your business.

The takeaway

Today's two stories are the same story told at two altitudes. A platform changed a cost you had already committed to and gave you a day. A platform changed who owns your part of the business and told nobody in advance. Neither one asks your permission. The sellers who stay profitable through Q4 are the ones who audit their own numbers on a schedule instead of waiting to be notified, and who keep enough inventory in more than one place that a single company's decisions cannot set their ceiling. Building that discipline into a weekly routine is the work we do inside The Income Lab.

Hero image: a USPS Grumman LLV mail truck, photographed by IFCAR and released into the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.