Wednesday, October 28 · Issue #7 · 6 min read.
IN TODAY'S ISSUE
eBay's sales volume counts the postage your buyer paid, and so does its commission
Adults are a third of all growth in the toy industry, and CVS just noticed
UPS is raising rates four days before Christmas
Let's get into it.
MARKETPLACES
eBay takes a cut of your postage, then calls it growth
Say you sell a $30 jar of jam. Your buyer pays $8 for shipping and $2.50 in sales tax. eBay calculates its commission from $40.50, not $30, because it charges the fee on the total sale amount. That $8 you hand straight to the carrier is included in that number, along with the $2.50 sales tax.
The post office has changed its prices at least 11 times this year. Every increase hits you twice: once when you buy the label, and again when eBay takes its cut.
That same $40.50 is the number eBay reports to investors as sales volume, so every postage increase in the country flows straight into the figure the market uses to judge whether eBay is winning. That figure grew 15% last quarter. eBay reports again today, and someone on that call will credit the growth to a turnaround or a new strategy. A slice of it is the post office charging more to move the same jar of jam. eBay isn't inventing anything here. The number counts dollars moved, not items sold.
Last Tuesday eBay cut 9% of its staff, the second round this year, days before the earnings report it says will beat forecast. A company growing 15% doesn't usually let go of a tenth of its people. Either the growth is thinner than the headline, or it isn't reaching the parts of the business that answer your support tickets. Either way, that's not good news if you're planning next year around the platform.
DEMAND
A drugstore is selling Pokémon cards to grown adults
CVS started stocking Pokémon cards, blind boxes and limited-time drops on Friday, next to the shampoo. Its merchandising chief said the appeal is finding something you weren't expecting on an ordinary trip. That's a polite way of saying the impulse rack now costs $20.
Adults account for 35% of all growth in the toy industry, and they're not buying for their kids. Pokémon sales jumped 87% last year, and the brand became the first in two decades to sell more than $2 billion worth. Halloween did the same this year, with growth in decorations rather than costumes.
Consumer confidence rose yesterday for the first time in four months, and in the same survey, plans to buy a car, a house, or an appliance all fell. People feel better and still won't buy the expensive thing. They'll buy themselves a small one.
Your holiday plan probably assumes the opposite. Gift guides, gifts for her, gifts under $50, wrap it and send it to somebody else. A good share of what sells in the next 8 weeks is a woman buying one nice thing for herself on a Tuesday.
Bottom line: Find the thing in your catalog people buy for themselves, and give it a page that admits it. No bow, no "perfect for the coffee lover in your life." Write it to the person who's going to use it. The easiest way to spot it is to look for the product your customers order twice in a row, because nobody buys the same gift for the same person twice, and that second order is the clearest signal that she kept the first one.
LOGISTICS
UPS is raising its rates four days before Christmas
UPS will raise ground, air, and international rates by an average of 5.9% on December 21. The annual increase normally lands in January, once everybody's stopped shipping. This one lands while your last Christmas orders are still moving, and a new fuel surcharge starts the same day.
Two more charges already landed. UPS raised its home delivery fee on Sunday, and FedEx raised its on Monday, and both go up again the week before Thanksgiving. Every order going to a house carries that fee. For most of you, that's every order.
Pirate Ship told its customers last week it'll stop sending rate-change alerts, because the carriers now change rates multiple times a week. The company whose whole pitch is cheap postage without the homework has decided the homework can't be done. USPS goes weekly in January, repricing fuel every 7 days with a few days' notice, and it hasn't published a starting number or a ceiling.
Bottom line: Go read what your site promises for December delivery, then work out what that promise costs you after the 21st. If you guarantee arrival by Christmas Eve, you're buying the last four days of it at a price UPS hasn't published yet. Pull your cutoff forward a few days and say so loudly on the product page in the first week of December. A published cutoff is a promise you control. A guaranteed arrival date is one the carrier controls, and the carrier has stopped telling anybody what it charges.
Steal this 👀
End every video and every live by naming the next one and what's in it.
QVC does about 200 hours a week of live selling on TikTok, and it closes each stream by teasing the next one instead of thanking people for watching. Not "see you soon." The day, the time, and the specific product. The same company trains its hosts to watch click-to-order rate rather than total sales, because that number tells you whether what you said on camera made anyone click.
Your version is the last 15 seconds of whatever you already post. Pick the day you'll go live or post next, say it out loud, and name one product. Watch for two things while you do it. Write that date on a calendar before you say it on camera, because the only thing worse than not teasing is teasing and not showing up. Then check how many people watched to the end. Every platform gives you that number for free, and it's the only honest measure of whether anybody's coming back.
Cost: nothing. Time: 15 seconds per post.
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Patch your website today.
Two critical PHP holes were made public on October 21 and attacked the same day. PHP runs WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento; an attacker can run commands on an unpatched server without a password, and the second bug reads passwords and keys straight from the server's memory. The federal cyber agency told everyone to patch immediately. Ask your host or developer one question today: Have we patched since October 21? Then change every password and API key stored on that server, including the ones your plugins use to reach Shopify, Amazon, or your payment processor. Patching shuts the door. It doesn't get back anything that already walked out, and nothing in your logs will tell you whether something did.
Amazon reopened the Black Friday deal window.
Last week we told you submissions closed on October 20 and that no amount of asking gets you the badge. In an October 23 update, Amazon moved the deadline to November 13. The inventory cutoffs didn't move with it, so a deal you submit in November still needs stock that arrived in October. Check your Deals dashboard product by product rather than assuming the announcement makes you eligible.
Meta starts counting more of your sales on November 12, and you're already enrolled. A new setting matches purchases on the shopper's own phone and turns on by default 15 days before Black Friday. Your reported conversions will rise without your actual sales rising, and Meta hasn't said whether the extra ones will change how it spends your budget. Compare Meta's numbers against your own order count in late November rather than trusting the jump, or switch it off in Events Manager if you'd rather keep a clean baseline through the one month that matters.
A 50% tariff on Canadian goods changes lists on Friday.
The White House reshuffled which Canadian products carry the extra duty on October 23, effective October 30. Shampoos, soaps, carpets, floor mats, wooden packing boxes, and paper labels get added. Corrugated cartons, paper bags, and molded pulp are removed. Packaging is on both lists, and most people will miss that. Send your broker your Canadian purchase orders this week.
Meta pushed its new terms back three weeks.
Last week we flagged the commercial terms that let Meta crawl your website, effective October 30. On October 23, Meta said the date is now November 20, but the contract text still said October 30 hours later. The crawling clause didn't change, and there's still no opt-out. You've got three more weeks to move anything that was never meant to be public, like a wholesale sheet behind a login that isn't really a login.
Etsy will waive its whole transaction fee on sales you bring in yourself. Through January 4, the Share & Save refund covers the full 6.5% on orders that arrive through your own tracked link, up from the usual 4%. Every sale you bring in from your own email list or your own Instagram is 6.5% cheaper than it was two weeks ago. One trap: if the buyer clicks one of Etsy's own ads after your link and before buying, you lose the refund and can owe an ad fee on top.
Walmart is letting outside AI shopping agents buy from it.
Shoppers get a separate agent profile with a spending limit and the option to approve each purchase, and the agent never sees card details. Amazon has spent the year blocking similar agents. Two of the biggest retailers have picked opposite sides on whether a machine can buy on a customer's behalf, and whoever wins decides whether a person reads your product page next year.
That's the week.
If you do only one urgent thing, ask your developer whether your site has been patched since October 21.
See you next Wednesday