eBay Italy have announced that from now on they will more accurately predict deliveries based on location specified by the seller and the post code of the delivery address specified on the payment confirmation.
The change is being made, say eBay Italy, to improve estimated dates of deliveries. eBay will display the address with post code along with the estimated delivery date on the item page.
We already have this in the UK of course – eBay change delivery date estimations dependent on cut off times and seller specified postage tables. What’s notable about the Italian announcement is the poor reputation of the Italian Postal service getting anything shipped from overseas delivered in a reasonable time scale. Royal Mail always seem to do a pretty good job of handing parcels over to the Italians, but then they often disappear into a black hole, even if tracking was paid for.
Best advice if you’re shipping to Italy is either to use a courier who in the whole seem to be pretty reliable, or simply to use eBay GSP and make the problem eBay’s rather than yours.
10 Responses
Italy’s postal system is a complete joke. Either they are completely disorganised and unable to handle any kind of deliveries, or the system is so corrupt and theft is rife. Rather than post anything to Italy, just save yourself the money and throw your package in the bin, it’s the same effect. I think (when we were naive enough to attempt to post packages to Italy) the going rate for a successful delivery to Italy was about 50%, if we were lucky.
Well TOUCH WOOD (Several times)
Since using DHL Global Mail, which are sent to Germany with a Deutsche Post tracking label, we have had VERY few losses.
All the mail is trackable via Poste Italiane once it arrives in Italy and the majority arrive without issue.
We use them for all international mail except Aus and NZ
I find the biggest pain Australia and NZ with RM Tracked.
You get tracking UP to the leaving the UK and then nothing.
If you are lucky then you get a delivery confirmation but otherwise nothing although they must get through otherwise there would be loads more claims!
Italy is unfortunately like playing the lottery as i believe this article and Ian implies.
Cannot see post codes making much difference, will not be posting to Italy regardless, complete waste of time, i would rather not have an inbox full of Italian customer emails, some of which seem to be ignorant to the state of their own postal service and completely unforgiving/impatient.
I get that we are responsible for the product and delivery even if we cannot control it, so it is easier to just not sent to Italy which is a shame because we know our products have demand in Italy.
Couriers are just too expensive for the items we sell, plus we cannot afford all of the failed courier deliveries which bounce back as undelivered costing us a fortune in shipping for outbound, some carriers also charge a return fee for delivering it back to us.
For us brits the situation with some European postal services such as Italy and Spain does leave us at some what of a disadvantage as The Italians and Spanish can import into Britain with relative ease and reliability but for us exporting to Spain and Italy, mostly it is a complete waste of time and leaves us with cross boarder trade imbalances.
Hi Simon. Could you advise how did you get that price from dhl? 3.6 is a bargain. We have many small items being sent to italy and got lost. Can you point me to right direction. Do you have account with dhl? Lookig into their prices on website theres nothing cheaper than £20
Thanks
Thanks