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eBay hides wireless listings without an FCC ID from 13 October

12 October 2026

eBay hides wireless listings without an FCC ID from 13 October

Three dated changes land between Tuesday and Thursday: eBay starts hiding US listings for wireless devices with no FCC ID, eBay's currency conversion charge goes up, and Amazon's holiday peak surcharge begins. If you sell the same stock across several channels, all three hit it in the same week.

eBay can hide your US wireless listings from Tuesday

eBay can hide your US wireless listings from Tuesday

eBay has been notifying sellers of radiofrequency devices - phones, tablets, laptops, drones and anything with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or cellular - that applicable listings need a valid FCC ID. From 13 October, listings without it may be hidden from US buyers or blocked from being created, revised or relisted. eBay has added an FCC ID field under optional item specifics. Reports point to federal exemptions for used devices, untouched listings created before 13 October, and sellers under the INFORM Act high-volume threshold, but eBay's own notice does not mention them.

This is not a fee you can price around. A hidden listing earns nothing, and you will not get an invoice line telling you why. The second-order risk is worse for multichannel sellers: if an old listing is exempt only while it stays untouched, any bulk revision - a price sync, a stock update, a title tweak pushed from your listing tool - could pull it into scope and get it blocked. Anything publishing to eBay from a central catalogue, which is what /flow handles, needs the FCC ID in the source data before the next sync runs, not after.

What to do: pull a report of every active US listing in your electronics categories, filter to anything with a radio chip, and add the FCC ID from the device label or the FCC database into the new item specific before you run any other bulk revision this week. Do the revisions in one pass so you are not repeatedly re-triggering the check.

Two cost rises stack on the same Q4 units

Two cost rises stack on the same Q4 units

Amazon's 2026 holiday peak fulfilment surcharge runs from 15 October 2026 to 14 January 2027, averaging around $0.32 per unit and charged on ship date, on top of standard 2026 FBA fees. The day before, on 14 October, eBay's currency conversion charge for US-registered sellers rises from 3% to 3.25% on funds converted for items listed or sold on another eBay site, with other markets following later.

The surcharge is per unit, not a percentage, so it bites hardest on your cheapest lines: 32 cents on a $9 multipack is a different problem to 32 cents on a $60 item. Because it is charged on ship date, stock already sitting in fulfilment centres is caught from Thursday with no action from you. The eBay change is smaller but compounds, landing on every cross-border order on top of final value fees and postage.

Neither shows up as a line you budgeted for. They surface as a quiet drop in net margin per order across two channels at once, which is exactly the kind of thing /profitability is built to catch before it becomes a quarter-end surprise.

What to do: sort your FBA catalogue by unit margin, find every SKU where 32 cents is more than 5% of what you keep, and decide this week whether you reprice, bundle or stop advertising it before Black Friday traffic multiplies the volume.

Quick hits

  • TikTok Shop: a new US Shop Performance Score replaces the current seller scorecard on 15 October - Product Satisfaction and Logistics & Fulfilment are recalculated, so your score can move without you changing anything.
  • eBay Australia: fee-free sellers move to fully managed shipping from 11 November - eBay takes over postage rates, payments and delivery options, so rebuild your margins around its rates now.
  • eBay: October Seller News launches Certified Recycled for US Motors sellers, with badging, a search filter, higher ranking and a new 'Used - Part on Vehicle' condition, plus UK card authentication and German bulk labels.
  • Walmart: seller performance reports now include returns split by item condition - useful for spotting which lines are quietly eating profit.
  • Multi-channel: Texas has proposed removing marketplace fees from taxable data processing services - it is only a proposal, so keep paying and do not budget the saving.

On your radar next week

  • Tuesday 13 October: eBay begins hiding or blocking US listings for radiofrequency devices with no FCC ID.
  • Wednesday 14 October: eBay's seller currency conversion charge rises from 3% to 3.25% for US-registered sellers.
  • Thursday 15 October: Amazon's FBA holiday peak surcharge starts, averaging about $0.32 per unit through 14 January 2027.
  • Thursday 15 October: TikTok Shop switches the US to the new Shop Performance Score, with knock-on changes for APIs used by seller software.

Sources

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