Reselling News: Whatnot Drops Flat Rate for Ground Advantage and eBay Pulls myFitment Off Other Platforms

The stack of free red and blue Flat Rate boxes in the corner of your packing area just lost one of its jobs. If you sell on Whatnot, the labels you print starting this weekend do not want that box at all.

Whatnot moved its USPS shipping to Ground Advantage on July 31

Whatnot switched the shipping engine underneath every US order. Its help center now files the change under the title USPS shipping updates on Whatnot starting July 31st, and Value Added Resource laid out the numbers when the notice first went up. Ground Advantage becomes the default service, and USPS Flat Rate shipping and Flat Rate packaging are no longer supported.

The rates for the middle of the range get better. A 1 to 5 pound package moves from 9.21 to about 7.20, which is roughly a 20 percent cut. Under a pound, pricing is now purely by weight: 4.47 under 4 ounces, 4.89 under 8 ounces, 5.25 under 12 ounces, and 6.57 under 16 ounces.

The trap is the packaging. Put a Ground Advantage label on a Flat Rate or Priority Mail box and USPS can bill a carrier fee of up to 20 dollars, which lands on your Whatnot balance. Those free boxes are free because they are prepaid for a service you are no longer buying. Whatnot has not lined up free Ground Advantage supplies either, so sourcing your own plain boxes and poly mailers is now part of the cost of selling there. Anyone shipping heavy bundles or regularly going over 5 pounds should reprice before the next show, because the savings sit in the light and middle weights, not the top end.

eBay is cutting myFitment off from Amazon and third-party tools

Auto parts sellers got an email on July 31. eBay is folding myFitment into its own platform-only Fitment Plus Auto program and shutting the standalone service down on September 30, with submission, monitoring, and correction for outside platforms ending October 1. Paid subscriptions drop to zero dollars immediately. Value Added Resource has the details.

If your fitment data only feeds eBay listings, this is close to a non-event. If it feeds Amazon, Rithum, or SureDone, it is a deadline. Fitment already applied to Amazon listings stays put, but nothing will update, correct, or monitor it after the cutoff, and there is no export or migration tool coming. Compatibility data is the reason a parts listing gets found at all, so pull a copy of yours now and decide where it lives next. Two months sounds like plenty of time until you are the one rebuilding a catalog by hand in September.

Amazon reported Q2, and third-party sellers carried most of it

Amazon posted its second quarter results on July 31. Total sales came in at 200.6 billion dollars, up 20 percent, with North America up 16 percent. The line that matters to anyone reselling is that third-party sellers accounted for 61 percent of worldwide paid units, on 17 percent unit growth. EcommerceBytes covered the report.

Six of every ten items leaving Amazon come from an independent seller. That is the argument for treating Amazon as a real channel rather than the place big brands go, and it is also the reason its fee schedule keeps moving. Volume that size is what platforms optimize against.

The takeaway

Two of today's three items are deadlines wearing the costume of an announcement. Whatnot changed what your packaging is allowed to be, and eBay put a September date on data some sellers have never exported. The sellers who stay profitable are the ones who read the boring notice and change one thing that same week. That habit, applied order by order, is what we work on inside The Income Lab.

Hero photo by Daniel Lu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.