Italy, as has much of the continent, been hit by some pretty severe weather of the past few weeks. You can’t have missed the Italian hotel which was buried in an avalanche and much of the country has been impacted. Our thoughts to out to those affected.
eBay continue to monitor the situation and want to reassure their sellers saying that they will protect sellers from any delivery delays or order cancellations due to the weather. eBay are telling sellers not to worry about weather related performance issues and measures will be put in place to protect them.
This may not help sellers outside of Italy who are shipping to customer located in the country however. It’s worth stepping up communications with any Italian customers and checking your courier reports for exceptions to Italy.
Italy is renowned for a less than perfect postal service and it’s one country that is well worth considering using eBay’s Global Fulfilment program to serve, in which case so long as you’re items gets to eBay’s shipping house on time you should have nothing further to worry about.
5 Responses
We’re having to start refunding some Italian customers on Ebay, so there’s no protection for us.
But this cold weather apart, the worst country for losses in 2016 (excepting the UK of course!), was the United States.
We’ve seen a steady but steep rise in Ebay claims from the States.
It is probably USPS, but it could also be those messages at the top and bottom of pages on ebay.co.com telling buyers they can get their money back.
Tracked services fare no better, they get no further than the NY Hudson Mail Center and simply vanish.
We’ve had a HUGE amount of Italian parcels going missing lately, no protection for us, and I’m sure Amazon don’t care either.
We had a package arrive late in Italy. It was slow over Christmas period and with the weather but got there. Buyer paid for standard postage and it took 24 working days to arrive. Tracking showed it was delivered to the recipient but he had raised a case and escalated and — on the day of the delivery — successfully got his refund.
We appealed and got no answer from IT cs until we chased Ireland — and got a curt response (in Italian) that showed they clearly hadn’t bothered checking the tracking to see it had been delivered. The seller has a responsibility to get the items to the buyer in the estimated time according to eBay regulations. I’ve looked for these regulations and how I can adjust the international delivery times to be more realistic, but they sadly do not exist.
No matter that this was tracked and showed delivered, there’s no way they were going to do the right thing. The buyer has the goods and the money.
I don’t list on IT. Why am I subject to IT customer service? Why won’t eBay behave like a global company? Management discussion today about whether to stop shipping to Italy.
We have also experienced a Huge increase in claims from the Usa.
Many of our packages have taken 6 to 8 weeks-Poland to the States when sent during end November to January.
Spain and Italy used to be the most difficult to ship to but not anymore.
Usa wins Hands Down !!!