Two of your shipping costs went up on Sunday

Good morning.

Big Deal Days ran yesterday and ends today. Target's event is the same two days, and Walmart's goes through Sunday. If you were going to find out whether your August pricing was right, you're finding out now.

This week: two of your shipping costs went up, and the third one is now permanent; Google starts pulling discounts off your website and putting them in your ads on Monday; your customer spent more in August than she has all year by dipping into savings; and DoorDash would like to handle your returns.

Let's get into it.

USPS raised its prices about 6% on Sunday, and they stay up until January 17. It hits Ground Advantage and Priority Mail, which is most of what a small shop ships. A three-pound package going a short distance costs about forty cents more. USPS announced this back in August, so there was no headline about it this week. It's already on the label you printed this morning.

Diesel isn't coming back down. The forecasts now run out to 2027, and the reason has nothing to do with the price of oil. There aren't enough refineries left to turn oil into diesel fast enough. We wrote about the record price in September as if it were a spike. It wasn't. The fuel surcharge on every parcel you ship is now a permanent cost.

Ocean shipping got cheaper this week, for somebody else. The average cost of a container dipped on Thursday, pulled down by the Asia-to-Europe route. China to Los Angeles didn't budge. China to New York went up. If you import from Asia, the prices are falling on routes you don't use.

Two things to do this week. Back in September we said to go find the fuel surcharge clause in your carrier contract. If you read it and decided to swallow the cost until things calmed down, that decision just expired. Raise your prices or change your shipping offer. Then redo your free-shipping threshold using this month's costs.

Walmart stretched its holiday return window. Almost anything bought between now and December 31 can go back until January 31. Electronics used to get thirty days. Phones got fourteen. A customer who buys a gift this week now has four months to change their mind.

DoorDash launched couch-side returns the day before. The customer books a pickup in the app, a driver shows up in about half an hour, takes the item back to the store, and the refund runs from there. No box. No label. No trip to a drop-off counter. It's $7.99 flat, live in some cities now, nationwide in November, and it launched with Macy's, Anthropologie, The North Face, Vans and Timberland.

DoorDash's pitch is that a retailer's stores become a growth channel instead of a warehouse three states away, which is a generous way of saying it only works if you have stores. You probably don't. What you have is a customer learning that sending something back means answering her front door, and then she'll try to return yours by mail.

Shopify starts charging tax on return shipping fees on October 23, which we covered last week. In eight days, the big guys made returns easier for shoppers, and your handling cost went up.

Don't match $7.99 and don't match four months. Work out what a return costs you first, because most owners don’t know the number: the inbound label, the minutes somebody spends inspecting and relisting the thing, and the units that come back in no condition to sell. Then pick one thing to be generous about. A 60-day window you can afford beats a 90-day window.

On October 12, Google Ads starts reading your website, pulling out any discount it finds, and attaching it to your Search and Performance Max ads. Google decides what counts as a promotion worth showing. You're already enrolled.

Campaigns where you wrote your own promotion get skipped. The merchants most exposed are the ones who never set one up, which is most merchants.

Go look at what's sitting on your site right now. The spring sale page nobody deleted. The clearance collection you keep unlinked. The wholesale discount behind a login that isn't really behind a login. The code that was supposed to go to one segment of your list. A scraper has no idea which of those you meant.

If Google runs one of these offers and nobody clicks, it won't show up in your reports at all. You find out about the offers that worked. You won't know about the ones it tried. The off switch is a single setting for your whole account: go to your automated assets settings, find Automated Promotions, turn it off.

Last week we wrote about agent checkout switching itself on inside Shopify stores. Same move, except this one comes with a date, which at least gives you the weekend.

Your Black Friday inventory has to be at Amazon next week.
Stock for Black Friday and Cyber Monday has to arrive by October 14, 21, or 28, depending on how you ship it in, and anything late loses the Prime badge for the week that matters most. Amazon kept its holiday fees flat this year and moved the cutoffs earlier instead, which is the more expensive change. Holiday fulfillment fees start October 15 and run through January 14, costing about 32 cents more per unit, plus a fuel surcharge.

Nike's online sales fell for the first time in nine years.
Its own digital business dropped 13% last quarter while the shoes it sells through other people's stores held roughly flat. Customers didn't stop buying Nikes. They stopped paying full price on nike.com. The biggest direct-to-consumer brand in the world is going back to wholesale. Think about that if your whole plan is owning the customer relationship.

eBay tripled its minimum ad rate for two days, then said it was only a test. Some sellers found the lowest Promoted Listings rate they were allowed to set had jumped from 2% to 5% on October 1 and 2, with no announcement. eBay later said selected customers saw a temporary pricing change and that no increase is planned. Anyone who raised their rates that week to stay competitive paid more for a restriction that doesn't exist. Go check what your listings are set to now rather than what you remember setting.

Anything you ship into the EU needs a new ID number from November 1. Customs will require a product identifier on every shipment from outside the EU to an EU buyer, no matter how cheap the item is: a barcode where one exists, or a manufacturer's own part number where it doesn't. The awkward cases are secondhand, vintage, handmade, and spare parts, where often no such number was ever issued, and eBay hasn't said what a seller should type in that box. If any part of your volume goes to Europe, ask your carrier this week what they expect in that field.

Google now answers four out of five brand-name searches before anyone reaches the site. AI summaries appeared on roughly a quarter of branded searches at the start of September and more than 80% of them by the end. Neither study measured clicks, so nobody can tell you what it costs yet. Type your own company name into Google this week and read what it says about you, because that's the version most new customers meet first.

The spam update that scrambled rankings last week hit again on the 30th. A second wave landed on September 30, after the first on September 25 through 27, with more expected across a two-week rollout. Site owners reported sharp drops on that exact date and Discover traffic vanishing again. If your organic numbers moved in the last ten days, this is the likeliest cause. Don't build your Q4 traffic forecast on the past two weeks, because you'd be forecasting off numbers Google is still rewriting.

Apple's latest iPhone update stopped several ad platforms from working in Safari. iOS 27 blocks The Trade Desk's ad-delivery domain and four smaller vendors, so the ad never loads, and the impression never happens. Google's equivalent kept working, and nobody has explained why. If any of your programmatic spend runs through those vendors, your Safari reach shrank last month without showing up anywhere in your reporting as a problem.

A 63-year-old retailer filed Chapter 11 and is closing 76 stores.
Leslie's, the pool-supply chain, filed on Friday to cut about $685 million in debt and expects to emerge in early 2027. Seasonal retail with one narrow selling window is under more pressure than anything else right now. Pull up your vendor list and see whether you share a supplier or a warehouse with them, because you'd rather read it in a filing than in an email.

Charging different shoppers different prices is turning into a legal problem. Maryland has banned it at grocery stores, the FTC proposed an enforcement policy in August, and Walmart's CEO has now said in public that the company won't price by who you are or what time it is. We covered the Walmart letter last week; this is the broader fight it came from. If you change pricing by customer segment, write down the reason before someone asks.

That's the week.

If you do only one thing after reading this, open your Google Ads account settings, find Automated Promotions, and decide on purpose whether Google can pull discounts off your website starting Monday. It takes two minutes, and it's the only item here with a deadline.

If you need help finding a better or new 3PL, we’d love to help at FulfillYN, the #1 3PL matchmaking service.

See you next Wednesday.