Image of Priority Mail Commercial Plus shipping label

[baypari]

Hello!

Can any one of the Top Rated Sellers be kind and post an image of any Priority Mail label with Commercial Plus pricing they have printed directly through eBay recently?

Thanks,

baypari

[green-night]

Why do you want to see that? 

I printed one 2 days ago but don't have a copy. 

I can tell you though that it was a 4 lb. package going to Australia.  Buyer paid $64.70 for shipping but after my discount my actual shipping cost was only $48.57.

[baypari]

Hi green-night,

Thanks for your reply. I wanted to scan the squarish PC Postage barcode on the top right hand side of the shipping label to learn exactly how much of a postage discount eBay is receving with its special NSA pricing arrangement with USPS and whether they are passing all of that discount to their top rated sellers.

Thanks again,

baypari

[richard1rst]

Just curious - Are you a Top Rated Seller?

If so, then the next time you print a label scan it yourself.

If you are not, then what difference does it make?

[johnrj1226]

For what it is worth, eBay  extends  the standard Commerical Rate discount to all eBay buyers that buy on line thru eBa.  This  discount varies depending on the type of  shipping service.   Top rated sellers thatreceive the Commercial rate plus discount which is 3%  more than the commerical rate but not all services that receive the commerical rate will receive the Commercial rate plus.  In  the Jan. 2017  USPS  price increase, USPS  "tightened" up their  discount programs.

Have no knowledge of the NSA pricign arrangement but this link will give you USPS pricing  for retail, commercial rate & commerical rate plus  you'll need to  do a lot of scrolling to find what you are looking for:  https://pe.usps.com/cpim/ftp/manuals/dmm300/notice123.pdf

[berserkerplanet]

Here's relevant portion of a $6.30 Padded Flat Rate label from 10/20/17:

The postage that would have shown on the label if I enabled it would have been $6.30 and when you scan and decode the 2d barcode you will find it also shows $6.30

I'm no expert on this, but I believe the encoded postage has to match the printed postage. IF eBay has some super secret back room discounted volume deal with USPS (Comm++), those prices are not going to show publicly on the labels or in the barcodes. IF they had such an arrangement, they would likely just get discounts on the total amounts paid to USPS or would get discounted via kickbacks or some such. Additionally, if eBay has such an arrangement, it's non of out business - they provide us access to Comm+, and any other gravy is theirs.

For anyone interested, I found the following with a nice walk through, a link to an online image decoder that can extract the binary data in the barcode, and an Excel spreadsheet that helps (didn't work well for me in Offfice2000, but enough to explain the data fields I was looking at)

http://www.frederickding.com/posts/2016/01/whats-in-that-usps-pc-postage-barcode-032643/

I manually worked through the data and found the encoded postage amount for that $6.30 Comm+ label was indeed $6.30

I believe this is an exercise in windmill tilting at.

[baypari]

Thanks a lot, berserkerplanet!

If your shipping label is truly from a TRS account, then it appears that the eBay Commercial Plus postage is way higher compared to Stamps.com, Endicia and Pitney Bowes.

Kind regards,

baypari

[partial*eclipse]

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@baypari wrote:

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 ... If your shipping label is truly from a TRS account, then it appears that the eBay Commercial Plus postage is way higher compared to Stamps.com, Endicia and Pitney Bowes....

$6.30 is the USPS published Commercial Plus rate for a padded flat rate envelope.  I doubt that those other postage services charge their users less.

http://pe.usps.com/cpim/ftp/manuals/dmm300/notice123.pdf