eBay USPS Ground Advantage Glitch Shows No Discounts & Massively Inflated Rates
UPDATE 10-21-24
eBay has revised their original announcement and is now telling sellers USPS holiday surcharges will apply, effective October 27.
Liz Morton
USPS will apply additional rate increases that will go into effect on October 27, 2024 for peak season. We’ve outlined the changes to eBay Labels below.
Zones 1-8
Flat Rate Envelopes & Boxes
Priority Mail will see increases on flat rate envelopes and boxes ranging from $0.50 - $1.20. Priority Mail Express will increase $1.55 on all envelopes.
Cubic Pricing
Priority Mail cubic pricing will increase from $0.30 - $0.80 and Ground Advantage cubic pricing from $0.30 - $1.25.
That confusion could certainly explain strange things sellers have been noticing with USPS Ground Advantage on the platform over the last few days - did eBay mess up and launch the new rates early or were they supposed to go into effect before and the original announcement was wrong?
eBay sellers say USPS Ground Advantage rates are wildly inaccurate when creating listings today, either showing standard rates without the usual eBay negotiated discount or clearly wildly inaccurate estimates.
gaschmooka
I am a seller and was trying to list something this morning, and notice that the usual ebay shipping discount for Ground Advantage is not showing up. Has something changed? Or is this a setting that is found somewhere? I listed several things yesterday and the discount was there.
harchin_72
Anyone else seeing a glitch with the shipping discount on eBay USPS ground advantage? Basically it’s not showing the discount and an absurd range of shipping cost?
casey-86
I noticed while I was filling out the details of a listing tonight I had a discount price showing for my selected service which was USPS Ground Advantage.
When I went through the listing and added a few more details to the item description I noticed the discount price went away for the label. I did not change any shipping details.
Why did this happen and how can I get the discount price to show again? Thanks
I noticed the same thing when preparing some auction draft listings this morning. Fortunately, I was not planning to list the items for a couple weeks, so hopefully it is fixed by then. Seems like eBay should have some urgency to address this, it's a big deal for buyers and sellers.
Some wondered if it could be related to the USPS peak holiday rate increase that went into effect on October 6th, but the timing doesn't make sense and eBay had said it would only impact packages shipping to Zone 9 (US Territories and some military addresses), packages weighing 21 lbs or more (all zones), packages with a dimensional (DIM) weight of 21 lbs or more (all zones), and
packages shipping to or from Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
Liz Morton
It is possible that eBay may be showing the increased holiday rates by default for estimates when listing, since they have no way to know ahead of time where the eventual buyer will be located, but that's not the only strange thing sellers are reporting seeing with USPS Ground Advantage rates on the listing form today.
Others shared screenshots of what they were seeing when listing through the app, clearly indicating a glitch is at least partially in play as it's highly unlikely any package would cost over $21 Million to ship via USPS Ground Advantage.
Glitches, testing and changes often go hand in hand at eBay, so it's not surprising that this is happening at the same time that some sellers are reporting a new design for how variation items are added in the listing form and others are experiencing problems sending offers through the app.
Liz Morton
eBay community staff have not responded to any of the posts about the issue and as usual, the system status page and the ongoing technical issues topic in the community don't show anything about it either.
Stay tuned for updates and let us know in the comments below if you're seeing anything strange with USPS Ground Advantage rates available through eBay!
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