Some news that eBay Store owners have been waiting for for a long time today: vacation settings on eBay.com are finally being improved so that buyers cannot buy fixed price items at all while sellers are on holiday.
Previously, though fixed price listings were hidden in search, buyers could still purchase them: buyers who were watching an item, for example, or who’d bought it before, could still buy it. This left sellers with a dilemma: whether to let items run and preserve their standing in best match, or whether to pull them to stop the risk of bad DSRs from buyers who didn’t notice the vacation notification.
Now sellers will be able to leave fixed price items running without the fear of coming home to furious emails from disgruntled buyers. It also brings eBay stores into line with Amazon which offers its sellers a similar feature.
Currently the announcement has been made for eBay.com only; we’ll try to find out what’s happening with eBay UK and post an update if there’s anything to tell.
14 Responses
About time too!
Please tell us that eBay UK are making the same improvements and quick!
I don’t think that is an improvement. I want the buyer to have to positively confirm that they are aware the item will not be posted until x date.
While they are about it they could set the DSR for despatch time to 5 if you set the item to despatched in seller pro on that day.
I cannot for the life of me understand why anybody would consider it reasonable to have items disappear from the searches. The searches are cause for enough headaches as it is.
I would suggest this:
1. Keep items in the searches!
2. Have listings with sellers on holiday marked in some way, so that buyers could tell. Have the expected return date shown.
3. Allow items to be placed on watch lists
4. Prevent items from being purchased
5. (arguable) Prevent ‘ask seller a question’
6. (for bonus points) When seller is ‘back from holiday’ – send an email to everyone with items on their watch list.
With this, visibility is maintained and sellers will not be at risk for ‘non-performance’.
The only down side is that eBay may dislike the lack of ‘immediate gratification’ of such an arrangement.
… just an idea.
like lemmings leaping off the cliff this parnoid scramble to be first in the pox Doctors Queue is verging on the insane,
Now this is one area that me living in deepest darkest Cornwall wins over everybody else. I do not need to go on holiday. I have the best countryside and coastline in the World on my doorstep. All I need is for the sun to shine and after doing the orders for the day I can go out for the day. All of those from Upcountry pay a fortune for this and I have it without having to shut up shop for longer than a couple of hours or so.
Off topic sorry – Thinking of selling on Amazon as well.
A couple of questions to anyone selling on both:
A If a product it the same price on both how much do you sell in comparison on each site? Is it 50:50?
B If you are not the cheapest on Amazon are your sales zero?
Thanks