Seller Bulletin / About
About
Seller Bulletin is one email a week for US Etsy sellers who ship real things and buy their own labels. It says what Etsy and USPS changed, prices each change on an example $35 order, gives the date to act by, and carries one tip that says who it’s from. Some weeks nothing changed, and the email says what we checked and that we found nothing. It’s free, and nobody at Etsy or USPS has anything to do with it.
Who runs it
A desk, not a person with a face on it. The letter says we because it is made by a desk: software does the reading and the first draft, code does the arithmetic, and a person reads every issue before it goes out and says yes or no. Nothing is sent without that yes. The publisher is Alex Vita, Bucharest, Romania, who gives that yes. The footer carries the same line: drafted with AI tools, approved by a person.
Dorothea Lange, 1938. Library of Congress.
In 1938 a gas station in Santa Fe painted a board that split a 20½¢ gallon into who took what, down to ME, 4¢. Dorothea Lange photographed it, and our sign does the same sum on an example $35 order every week.
Where the sign comes from
The board gives the gasoline its 5½¢, then the state, Uncle Sam, the city, the railroad and the agent their shares, and ends on the owner’s own 4¢ above the total. A seller, in public, in cents. Our sign does the same for an example $35 order: Etsy’s fees, which are the same rates for every US seller, and then the rest, which is yours. The one row we leave open is the label, because the price USPS publishes isn’t what most sellers pay, and a board that printed it would be wrong for most of the people reading it. That rule holds for everything on the sign: a figure goes on it only if it’s true for nearly every reader, or it says whose it is.
How it’s made
Each week we read Etsy’s Help Center, its policy pages and its announcements, eBay’s board (where USPS label changes get posted for sellers), USPS’s price files and releases, and the official pages behind any customs change. Items are drafted from those pages, never from another newsletter. Code does the arithmetic on the example order to the cent, rounding half up. A person reads the issue, checks each figure against its source, and approves it or doesn’t.
How we check
Every figure carries a source and a date. Etsy’s figures are its published rates, which are the same for every US seller on Etsy Payments; a dollar figure is on the example $35 order and says so. USPS’s figures are named as its published list price, with who pays list and what sellers report. A price read off Etsy’s postage calculator is one parcel on one lane on one day, and it says so. A number we estimated is hedged, and a number we counted goes in bare. If we couldn’t read a page, the letter says so rather than printing a zero. Every date has a checked weekday or none.
What we won’t do
We won’t tell you to discount, enroll, switch carriers, raise prices or leave Etsy. The arithmetic is ours and the call is yours. We won’t name a villain, at Etsy, at USPS or anywhere else. We won’t post in your groups, comment on your threads or message you. We won’t copy an article, quote more than one sentence from a page, or print a seller’s post with a name on it. We won’t print your name without your yes. We won’t estimate your taxes, and an item about tax, law or customs carries the words “information, not tax or legal advice”. We won’t run banking, loan, insurance or credit offers.
How it makes money
The letter is free, and this is the whole policy. At most one affiliate link per issue, marked where it sits, never in the subject line, and never on the label-cost page. Never from a company whose tip we might credit, so a tip is never a sales pitch in disguise. No sponsor touches a number, and no sponsor line sits inside an item. If any of that changes, this page says so first.
Corrections
When we get a figure wrong, the next issue says so, and the archive copy of the issue it ran in gets a dated correction under it. The original stays as sent. Reply to any issue with the figure and the source and we’ll check it.
Write to us
hello@sellerbulletin.com, or reply to any issue. We read every reply, and the ones we can date get answered in the letter.
Marks
Etsy is a trademark of Etsy, Inc. This content is not created or endorsed by Etsy, Inc. Seller Bulletin is not affiliated with Etsy, eBay, USPS or any carrier; their names appear here to describe them.