Jane, known as the eBay Anorak, is an eBay Specialist Consultant with a very healthy client base of different sized UK & International businesses across many categories. She also manages listings for a local company, and both listings and fulfilment of a global European based company’s UK shop plus her own eBay UK shop, these are all Top Rated Powerseller accounts.
With 13 years experience in addition to that of many UK clients Jane helps on a continuous basis, today she shares a few thoughts on eBay’s latest Seller Release:
Further to my previous guest post in July outlining the changes I would make to eBay after they divorce from Paypal, I’m quite positive on the latest Seller Release and feel it has promise and that eBay have started to listen to their sellers at last.
As mentioned previously, (regardless of the changes to defects and tracking etc) I’d like eBay to add an extra day or two to the estimated delivery time, we know not all items turn up when eBay say they will. This gives a false expectation to the buyer and therefore they’re disappointed, isn’t it better to give realistic expectations rather than disappointment to a buyer who may be relying on the delivery date? Standard post is not as reliable as Amazon Prime when it comes to expected delivery dates.
For those low volume sellers all new changes are not created equal. Those validated on twelve month look back period will have defects included before the new changes take effect and unlike those on a three month look back, will not have the chance to alter their systems to get the required percentage in time. I wonder if eBay intend to make it a three month validation period for all? Now that would be a nice and a fair thing to do.
Looking at the timetable for the integration of tracking information into My eBay, I note that Royal Mail is set as ‘by October’. I’m really hoping this is to coincide with the 2D bar code requirements for Royal Mail. Although I read it isn’t compulsory to use them in October, I’d like the bar codes to show an acceptance scan for untracked items and be automatically used by eBay as an electronic certificate of Postage. But perhaps that’s just my irritatingly positive wishful thinking.
Do you think there’s a chance?
[Editors note: We have of course put the question to both eBay and Royal Mail as to whether the new 2D bar codes will show as acceptance/delivery scans for eBay On-Time deliveries. We’re waiting for an answer but suspect that it may well be an “Eventually, but not this year” – Royal Mail aren’t due to make the scan information public until sometime in the Spring.]
9 Responses
we very much doubt that any changes are due to ebay listening to sellers out of respect or concern for their well being, its probably more to do with sellers moving elsewhere and loss of revenue
Well the changes are coming and I know that this last 12 months has been the hardest yet to make a few quid on eBay so hopefully these new updates will help the one time successful old school traders not these new foreign immoral cheap market trader types.
It’s funny, the buyers want cheap price, marketplaces force and promote cheap but yet they both expect premium item and service, does no one do economics anymore?! U can’t provide premium on peanuts u silly sausages
For the last couple of years ebay seems to have really got me down. Quite apart from slumping sales, the site is not easy to use, and for some reason a significant troublesome minority of the customers have incredibly high expectations and give me a lot of stress.
I also seem to have been subject to the latest scam in town of ebay buyers claiming chargebacks on paypal transactions.
For me, whatever they do is likely to be too little to late.