There’s a recurring complaint that keeps coming up on Tamebay – eBay’s interpretation of Royal Mail’s delivery estimates.
eBay to vary the delivery expectation slightly depending on what area of the country you’re shipping from and what area of the country your buyer lives. If you’re worried that Royal Mail only deliver 93% of 1st Class mail the next working day at least you know that eBay are trying to make allowances.
It’s generally only a day either way for the areas it’s likely to take longer for items to arrive and here’s two screen shots for the same product showing a slightly different delivery expectation:
eBay delivery estimate for a Reading postcode
eBay delivery estimate for a Shetland Islands postcode
We know that this isn’t perfect. We know it won’t solve all your On-Time delivery worries. However at least it demonstrates that eBay do know in certain areas of the country it’s by no means unusual for Royal Mail deliveries to take a little longer.
3 Responses
eBay know eff all.
Special Delivery to Shetland is two working days by 5.30pm for ZE2-ZE3 postcodes compared to next day by 1pm for any UK mainland postcode. But eBay ‘estimate’ first class could get there next day, a day before that Special Delivery package and at the latest the same day as Special Delivery.
Jesus wept.
What happens if the item location is the ZE2 postcode does it allow an extra day delivery to the rest of the UK?
I did post this on another thread on the site but it is very relevant to this subject.
On 23rd Feb I spoke to an Ebay manager named Eamonn concerning the delivery dates that ebay are placing on sales.
I cited two sold items being sent to London and Devon from East Anglia.
One had next day delivery the other had 2 days.
I was told that this was because ebay determine the delivery time by the postcode. I was very specific in getting this from ebay they use the buyers postcode to determine the delivery time.
I then asked why the closer London item had the longer delivery time than the Devon item, he tried to flannel things then and referred me to an Ebay announcement in April 2015 concerning post deliveries.
And states
“From 23 April our estimated delivery dates for certain carrier services will be based on the postcode of the item location the seller has specified as well as the delivery postcode specified by the buyer.
We are making this change to improve the accuracy of delivery estimates. The delivery address postcode used to estimate the date of delivery will be shown along with the item estimated delivery date on the view item page”.
It was very obvious that the Ebay staff in Ireland have absolutely no idea how Royal Mail operates. They could not grasp the concept that a letter is posted one day and arrives the next and the charge is the same throughout the UK.
I did ascertain from Eamonn that this whole delivery seller standard was devised by staff from Ebay.com and Ireland.
So if they cannot understand how a simple 1st class letter is delivered how can they understand anything else.