eBay have made some changes to Seller Protection when you’re shipping to 34 overseas destinations. As long as you ship quickly and don’t incur any other defects. eBay will remove any delivery related dings.
Here’s what they say (the full announcement is here): “We’ve improved our seller protection. Our new policies help make sure that international postage delays won’t affect your seller standard when you sell to buyers in certain countries.
From 5 November, we’ll automatically remove any delivery-related defects from buyers from the 34 countries listed below. This includes:
– eBay Money Back Guarantee requests for an item not received
– Negative or neutral Feedback
– Low detailed seller ratings for delivery time on eBay.co.uk and eBay.ie
Just make sure you resolve any issues quickly, and the transaction doesn’t have any other defects. Make sure you’ve specified which countries you post your items to. You can do this in the postage and packaging section of your listings.”
The countries in question are:
Argentina, Armenia,Belarus, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Greece, Israel, Hungary, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates and Zambia
19 Responses
All the countries on our excluded list! I am guessing from this change that they are on a number of peoples blocked list too!
Very welcome, and long overdue, particularly for some like Lithuania, Brazil and Argentina.
However, a number of these I have never had a problem of any kind, and wonder what dark secrets and disasters other sellers have had – places like Hungary and Czech Republic. Interesting to see list includes Bulgaria, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In my experience delivery here is much more reliable than many countries with supposedly more highly developed postal systems.
There is one huge glaring omission from this list, the country that causes more postal problems than the rest of them put together – ITALY.
What about Norway? I sent several orders to the same bloke in Norway. I remember the first took for ages to arrive. I was just about convinced that I had lost it. The customer assured me that the Norwegian Postal Authorities were always slow. He was not worried about the delay and then it arrived and I must admit that I breathed a sigh of relief. None have gone astray but all seem to have taken way over what I would have thought to arrive.
I find the delivery estimates quoted by Royal Mail to some European countries and Rest of World, are wholly inaccurate. They state on their website,
•Delivery to Europe in 3 to 5 working days
•Delivery to the rest of the world in 5 to 7 working days
eBay then use these figures to create an “Estimated” delivery date which over promises to the buyer. It seems some buyers don’t understand the word “Estimated” or the term “Working days” and if it doesn’t arrive in Italy in 3-5 days they assume the item is lost, open a INR case and leave appropriate feedback.
Surely it is better to revise these dates, and delay when a buyer can open an INR case, rather than protecting the seller from eBay’s own mess from over promising to buyers? I was always taught in retail to under promise and then when the item arrives earlier than stated the customer is even happier!
I also agree that ITALY should be listed.
Futhermore Australia.
Australia ist a problem as AU Post does not support internation tracked / registered mail numbers.
When you send from the UK to AU you can see when your item left the UK but you are not able to track this on AU Post Website.
We don’t currently ship worldwide, we do Europe and some others but not USA/Australia – maybe we are missing out? (If anybody has any stats)
Italy is on our blocklist, had enough of it.
France also is close, though we do sell quite a number to the Frenchies.