Wednesday, October 21 · Issue #6 · 6 min read.
Good morning.
Your Ground Advantage rates differ from Friday, and whether they went up depends on your customer's location.
IN TODAY'S ISSUE
USPS now prices Ground Advantage by destination ZIP code, and the rate card isn't public
Almost a third of holiday spending happens before Halloween, and the biggest budgets are already shopping
Poppi's $300 million earnout is down to $12 million, and no contract was broken
Let's get into it.
LOGISTICS
USPS started charging you by your customer's ZIP code on Sunday
USPS replaced its two-tier Ground Advantage pricing with three destination groups on Sunday, covering more than 25,000 ZIP codes. Some destinations got cheaper. Some got more expensive. No rate card went out showing which is which.
The old split was simple: standard pricing, or rural pricing. Two of the new groups match that old rural list exactly. The third one swept up thousands of ZIP codes that used to be priced as standard, and nobody outside USPS can yet say whether those cost more or less now. Priority Mail wasn't touched.
If you charge a flat rate or offer free shipping over a threshold, you agreed this weekend to a price you can't see. Sellers using calculated rates will see it at checkout. Everyone else finds out in the margin report.
A freight index published last Wednesday put the average fuel surcharge at 30% of the transportation rate and found that nearly three-quarters of the climb since 2021 came from carriers rewriting their surcharge tables rather than from diesel prices. Diesel is the reason they give you. The table is where the number comes from.
Bottom line: Pull the destination ZIPs off your last 200 orders and check them against the new groups. Most small shops ship to a dozen states and a few clusters within them, so this is a 20-minute job that ends with a real number. Your average shipping cost describes none of your customers.
THE CONSUMER
A third of the holiday budget is gone before Halloween
Shoppers expect to have spent 28% of their holiday budgets by the end of this month, the highest share in 6 years. The season you're planning for started three weeks ago.
The shoppers hunting hardest for a deal aren't the broke ones. People who use five or more money-saving tactics plan to spend 12% more than everybody else, and most of them were already buying in October. The customer with the biggest budget started first, because that’s how she affords it.
Retail sales did rise last month. Gas stations produced about $7 of every $10 of September's increase, while online spending barely moved. A headline about resilient consumers can be true and still mean nothing for you.
Nobody can tell you whether this season is bigger or smaller than last year's. This month's forecasts can't agree on whether it will grow or shrink. They agree on one thing: when the money moves.
Bottom line: Take the offer you were holding for Black Friday week and run a version of it in the next 10 days. Then check that whatever you're about to promote is in stock now, not on a boat, because October shoppers are also your best warning on what to reorder. The person still deciding in late November isn't the one with the money this year.
EXITS
Poppi's $300 million earnout is down to $12 million, and nobody broke the contract
PepsiCo bought Poppi for $1.95 billion and promised up to $300 million more if the brand hit its growth numbers. The filing that landed this month carries that promise at $12 million. The deadline is the third quarter of 2027, so nothing is owed yet, and nobody has been refused a cent.
The version that went around all week is that Pepsi stiffed the founders. It didn't, and what did happen should bother you more. That $12 million is Pepsi's own estimate of what it expects to pay, based on Pepsi's forecasts of Poppi's revenue and margins. It sat at $117 million in June. A quarter later, it was $12 million.
Pepsi says Poppi's volume grew double digits last quarter and the brand took share in soda. Both of those can be true at the same time as the markdown. An earnout doesn't pay for doing well; it pays for hitting a specific number by a specific date, and the company steering toward that number now owns your pricing, shelf space, and marketing budget.
You're not selling for $2 billion. The clause is the same at every size, and it appears in almost every small acquisition: a multiple on next year's revenue, a bonus if the big customer renews, a holdback until the transition is signed off. The money you fight hardest for in the negotiation is the money you collect last, from somebody who controls the inputs by the time it's due.
Bottom line: If an earnout ever lands in front of you, ask one question before you read the rest of the page: who controls the number this depends on? When the answer is the buyer, which it almost always is, price the earnout at zero and go argue about the cash. Treat it as a tip, not as part of the price.
Steal this 👀
Cap the run, announce the cap, and judge it by the comments.
Bath & Body Works has a small team that ships limited fragrance drops every 8 to 12 weeks instead of once a year, and one trio of mists sold out online in 3 minutes. The team says it doesn't grade a drop on sales at all. They read comments and reviews to see what people want, and that feedback shapes next year's full collection.
Your version: take one variant of something you already make, cap it at a quantity you could eat if it flops, say the number out loud on the page, and don't restock it. Do two things while it runs. Write down what you expect people to say before you launch, so you can tell afterward whether you learned anything. Then reply to every comment, because the complaint you hear twice is your product brief.
Cost: one small run, or nothing at all if the variant is a bundle of stock you're already holding. Time: an hour to build the page.
FROM FULFILLYN
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Or just reply to this email with what you ship.
Meta gave itself permission to copy your website.
New commercial terms taking effect October 30 let Meta point software at sites linked to your products, read them, and use what it finds to train its own products. There's no opt-out, no partial opt-out, and continuing to buy ads counts as agreeing. Meta says it wants accurate product information from third-party sites.
Poshmark stops paying for heavy packages on October 26.
If you ship over 5 lbs without buying the label upgrade first, Poshmark will deduct postage from your earnings instead of covering it: $5 up to 10 lbs, $10 up to 15, $15 above that, and the full postal cost past 25. The workaround is splitting a heavy order into two boxes with two labels.
Amazon's January 31 return deadline is permanent now.
Amazon told sellers on Friday that anything bought between November 1 and December 31 can come back until January 31, and that the same window will apply every year from here. Apple products get until January 15. If you fulfill your own Amazon orders, that return arrives at your door on a label you paid for. Price your December margin with a 3-month tail on it rather than a 30-day one.
Amazon's Black Friday deal window closed yesterday.
Submissions for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals shut on October 20, after being open since July. A promotion costs $100 up front plus 1.5% of what it sells. If you didn't get one in, your Black Friday on Amazon comes down to price, ad spend, and inventory, and no amount of asking will get you the badge.
Etsy pays part of your buyer's shipping.
Etsy has started capping shipping on some US orders and covering the difference out of its own pocket, so the buyer sees a smaller number and you still collect your full calculated rate. It's a random test; you don't need to do anything, and Etsy hasn't said whether it deducts its fees from your rate or the buyer's.
UPS put box-free returns inside TikTok Shop.
A TikTok Shop customer can now return an item without a box or label by dropping it off at one of roughly 10,000 counters, including UPS Stores, Staples, and Ulta. If TikTok fulfills your orders, you don't need to switch anything on.
Google's shared cart for AI shopping went live last week.
Google started rolling out a cart that holds products from several different retailers at once and checks out across all of them, inside both its AI search results and its assistant app. Some Shopify stores are already in it, alongside Walmart, Ulta and Wayfair.
Your shipping history is turning into your credit file.
FedEx and Stripe are building a merchant financing product due early next year that will weigh your payment and shipping data, and the platform lenders already work this way. Returns, disputes, and how reliably you ship can all move the offer you get.
That's the week.
If you do only one thing after reading this, export the destination ZIP codes from your last 200 orders and check them against the new USPS groups. The rates changed on Sunday; nobody will notify you, and this is the only item here where 20 minutes of work tells you exactly how much money is involved.
See you next Wednesday