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Prime Big Deal Days hits as eBay raises currency conversion fees

5 October 2026

Prime Big Deal Days hits as eBay raises currency conversion fees

Peak season started in earnest this week. Amazon and Walmart are running overlapping sales events, and three separate cost rises land between now and December: eBay's currency conversion charge, Amazon's holiday fulfilment surcharge and the EU's new €2 customs handling fee. If you sell on several channels, the traffic spike and the cost rises arrive at the same time, which is exactly when margin disappears without anyone noticing.

Amazon and Walmart are selling against each other all week

Amazon and Walmart are selling against each other all week

Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days runs 6 to 7 October, a 48-hour Prime-member event, with some deals live before the official window. Walmart opened its own event at midnight ET on 5 October and is running online until 11 October, teasing up to 50% off home, up to 40% off fashion and tech, and up to 30% off toys.

The two events overlap, so shoppers are price-checking the same products across both sites and then landing on your own store or eBay listing with a deal price in their head. If you sell the same SKU in more than one place, a two-day Amazon spike also draws down the same stock pool that has to cover Walmart's full week, Black Friday and the run-in to Christmas.

There is a cost side too. Discounted units sold at peak ad spend often look fine on gross revenue and poor once referral fees, fulfilment and promotion costs are counted, and that gap only shows up when you look at net profit by SKU per channel rather than at sales totals, which is what /profitability is built for.

What to do: pick your ten highest-volume SKUs, set a floor price that still clears a profit after fees and the new surcharge, and put a hard stock reserve on anything you cannot restock before December so an event week cannot strip your Q4 cover. /inventory will show you which lines are closest to that line.

eBay is raising its currency conversion charge in eight markets

eBay is raising its currency conversion charge in eight markets

eBay is adding 0.25 percentage points to its seller currency conversion charge. US and Canadian sellers go from 3% to 3.25% on 14 October, Australia follows on 1 November, UK sellers move from 2.5% to 2.75% on 1 December, and Germany, France, Italy and Spain go to 3.25% on 2 December. The change appeared on regional fee pages rather than in a Seller Update.

The charge applies every time a payout is converted, so it is a percentage off the top of your cross-border revenue, not a one-off. On a £12 item sold into a foreign currency it is pennies; across a few thousand cross-border orders in Q4 it is a real number, and it stacks with the fees you already pay on the same sale. The staggered dates are the awkward part: your margin model goes out of date on four different days, mid-peak, in four different markets, and /integrations/ebay is where you will see the converted payouts arriving at the new rate.

What to do: pull last quarter's eBay payouts, split them by currency, and work out what an extra 0.25 points costs you per market. If one market is marginal already, raise prices there now rather than in January, and diarise 14 October, 1 November, 1 December and 2 December so the increase does not land as a surprise in your settlement.

Quick hits

  • Amazon: the holiday peak fulfilment surcharge of roughly $0.32 a unit runs 15 October to 14 January - it covers FBA, Multi-Channel Fulfillment and Buy with Prime and sits on top of the fuel and logistics surcharge.
  • Amazon: Buy Shipping now sells less-than-truckload labels for heavy and bulky merchant-fulfilled orders - negotiated rates and late-delivery protection without arranging freight yourself, with regional heavy and bulky pricing due early 2027.
  • Shopify: market-driven shipping opt-in opened on 1 October with full migration targeted for 1 July 2027, and scriptTagCreate and scriptTagUpdate now error on all API versions - shipping setup moves into Markets, and older apps that inject storefront code can no longer be updated.
  • Shopify: US return shipping fees get taxed automatically from 23 October - if you currently add that tax manually, remove the workaround or customers pay it twice.
  • Multi-channel: the EU's €2 customs handling fee on imported distance sales applies by 1 November - on top of July's €3 duty, it wipes out the margin on cheap parcels sent into the bloc.
  • TikTok Shop: Best Buy launches in late October with nearly 10,000 products - electronics sellers will be competing for feed placement against a national chain with brand-name stock.

On your radar next week

  • 6-7 October: Amazon Prime Big Deal Days, 48 hours of Prime-member traffic.
  • 5-11 October: Walmart's deals event runs online all week against it.
  • 15 October: Amazon's holiday peak fulfilment surcharge starts, running to 14 January.
  • 23 October: Shopify begins taxing US return shipping fees automatically.
  • Late October: Best Buy's TikTok Shop storefront goes live.

Sources

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