With the cost of a USPS First Class stamp increasing on Sunday, eBay is raising rates for Standard Envelope, its service for shipping small, low-cost collectibles through the mail. No need to panic, though – the rates are going up by only 2 cents across the board.
eBay Standard Envelope has a lot of restrictions and is available only in a few categories: Trading Cards, Postcards, Stamps, and Currency and Coins.
The appeal of eBay Standard Envelope is that buyers and sellers can track items (on a limited basis) and it comes with certain protections. Basically, it’s between putting a trading card in an envelope with a First Class stamp, which doesn’t offer any tracking, and sending it First Class Package Service, which offers tracking but costs significantly more.
In Thursday’s announcement, eBay published the new rates for eBay Standard Envelope as of August 29, 2021:
- A 1-ounce envelope increases from 51 cents to 53 cents;
- A 2-ounce envelope increases from 71 cents to 73 cents;
- A 3-ounce envelope increases from 91 cents to 93 cents.
Each category has its own restrictions; for example, sellers are restricted to sending no more than 15 raw trading cards per package per envelope, while sellers are restricted to sending nor more than 10 stamps or 3 postcards.
There are also restrictions on the size, thickness, and weight of envelopes.
As for protections, eBay explains: “You are still responsible for getting the order to the buyer in good shape. However, each eBay standard envelope shipment includes a $20 shipping protection plan on a single order and up to $50 on combined orders to help in case of lost or damaged items.”
You can learn more about eBay Standard Envelope offering on this page.
And you can read today’s full announcement on this page.
eBay in fact began CHARGING the $0.53 per one-ounce envelope on Friday August 27th.
But the postage as visible on the label is still for $0.51. eBay is pocketing that extra 2 cents for every Standard Envelope label printed on Friday and Saturday.
When I called eBay to report this, the rep confirmed that postage for Standard Envelope is printed through a plugin for USPS, and it is supposed to mirror their rates. He also told me that I had to wait until Monday the 30th to file a bug report since that’s when the increase is supposed to go live.
Plenty of people will shrug off a few lost pennies as no big deal, if they even notice it at all, and I bet plenty more would rather sacrifice a buck or two in lost revenue than suffer a series of phone calls to get it fixed.
Pretty slick trick for eBay, isn’t it?
Ebay can tell you just how much those pennies add up. A few years back there was an increase in postage that caused the online rate to erroneously be more than the retail rate at that time. USPS addressed this by lowering the rate $0.06 on the first 4 ounces of a First Class Package as this was where the error seemed to be. All of the other label printing services lowered their rates on that first 4 ounces by the $.06 but Ebay refused to do so claiming that they were not sure that the USPS would not come back on them and force them to pay that difference back so they maintained that extra charge for about 2 months during which time many Sellers, myself included, switched from printing their labels on Ebay to using other 3rd party companies.
Ebay finally gave in when they saw just how much their shipping revenue had declined due to all of those Sellers defecting to other services and made the old familiar announcement “You Spoke and We Listened” and lowered their prices to the same amount that the other services were charging in hopes that the Sellers would come back. I’m sure some did go back to Ebay but from what I heard in discussions with other sellers was the same thing that I thought, the service i got from the new company far outweighed what i had gotten from Ebay and Ebay was also keeping all of that overcharged shipping revenue still claiming they might still have to repay it to USPS. That never did happen but as usual Ebay kept those overcharged amounts and have been doing so ever since with their self created glitches.
It may have been small potatoes to the individual sellers who were overcharged, but you better believe that for the resellers like Ebay, those pennies added up to millions of dollars during that 2 month period. The only reason they changed at all was the loss of shipping revenue overall as so many sellers had left that the $0.06 overcharge on the lightweight packages was being outweighed by all of the lost shipping revenue and that started the defection of Sellers to 3rd party sites for services that Ebay had been supplying and started the slip in marketshare that Ebay has been dealing with ever since in all aspects of their business model.
yesterday I just notices a price rise for media. 2 pounds went from 3.45 to 3.81. Did I miss the notice?
First Class mail (market dominant services) went up on Sunday, August 29, including media mail and cost of a stamp.
https://www.ecommercebytes.com/2021/05/28/usps-to-raise-rates-at-the-end-of-august/