Reselling News: Whatnot Drops Commission to Zero on August 7 and eBay Moves to End Auction Sniping

Three things landed this week that are worth putting on a calendar rather than just reading. One is a free money day, one is a rule change that rewrites how auctions end, and one is a number drop that tells you where a marketplace is headed next.

Whatnot is charging no commission at all on Friday

Whatnot is running a 0 percent seller commission day on Friday, August 7. Whatnot's own FAQ puts the window at 12:00 AM to 11:59 PM in your local time, based on the address on your account, and it covers both live show sales and marketplace sales. It applies globally to every seller, and it applies automatically, so there is nothing to opt into.

Read the fine print before you plan your week around it. Commission goes to zero, but standard payment processing fees still come out of every order. That is the fee that survives, and on a low-price item it is a bigger share of the sale than most sellers think.

The move here is straightforward. If you already sell on Whatnot, shift what you can into Friday: schedule your shows there, and hold marketplace listings you were about to publish so they go live inside the window. If you have been meaning to run your first show, a day where the platform takes nothing is a cheap day to be bad at it.

eBay is turning off the last second snipe, starting in Australia

Sniping has been the way eBay auctions get won since the beginning. That is ending, at least in one market. eBay Australia is rolling extended bidding out to all auctions from August 17. When a bid comes in during the final minute, the clock resets to 60 seconds, and it keeps resetting until the bidding actually stops. Sellers do not appear to get a choice about it.

This is not out of nowhere. eBay started testing the format in trading card auctions in 2025 across the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, with a two minute extension on bids placed in the last two minutes, then added vehicles to the pilot. Australia is the first market to get it on everything. No US, UK, Canada, or Germany announcement has been made yet.

For a seller, the direction of travel is good. A snipe wins at the price the previous bidder walked away at, which means the item sells for one increment above the second highest bidder's comfort level rather than what two motivated buyers would have paid each other. Extended bidding lets those two fight it out. If you run auctions, the practical prep is to stop timing your endings around when snipers are awake and start timing them around when your buyers are, because the ending minute stops being the whole auction.

eBay reports Q2 on Wednesday, and the timing matters

eBay releases second quarter results after the close on Wednesday, August 5, with the call at 5:30 PM Eastern. Ordinarily that is investor business, not seller business. This one is different because of what is sitting around it. eBay closed its acquisition of Depop on July 30, and GameStop is holding a 9.8 percent stake in eBay after eBay's board rejected its 125 dollar per share takeover proposal in May.

You do not need to care about the share price. You should care that earnings calls are where a marketplace says out loud what it plans to lean on, and lately that has meant advertising and fee structure. What management emphasizes on Wednesday about promoted listings, live selling, and the Depop side of the house is a reasonable preview of what shows up in a seller update later this year.

The takeaway

Put August 7 on the calendar and move inventory into it. Everything else this week is information, but that one is money. Knowing which platform deserves your listing hours in a given week, and reading a fee change for what it actually costs you rather than what the headline says, is the habit we build inside The Income Lab.

Hero uses the Whatnot wordmark, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.