eBay have officially announced the introduction of eBay Managed Delivery, an end-to-end fulfillment service that will be available to US sellers in 2020. Most interesting of all is that from day one eBay will fulfil orders sold both on and off eBay – they’ll happily fulfil your website orders and sales on other marketplaces.
eBay Managed Delivery will they say be a competitively-priced, reliable and fast shipping option for businesses. They anticipate sellers with high-volume inventory in popular categories like Electronics, Home & Garden, and Fashion will benefit the most from the new service.
With Managed Delivery, our national fulfillment partners will store, pack, and ship your items. You’ll be able to seamlessly manage and track your inventory through Seller Hub and third-party integrations.
eBay are still finalising the process of designing the eBay Managed Delivery service. If you want to tell eBay what’s important to you then you can fill out a survey to let them know.
eBay Managed Delivery Benefits for sellers
Lower fulfillment costs
With Managed Delivery, eBay say that you’ll save on fulfillment/delivery costs because eBay will negotiate competitive rates on 1-day 2-day and 3-day delivery options.
Seller Protection
Sellers enrolled in Managed Delivery will receive the same protections as Top Rated Sellers for Managed Delivery transactions. In addition, eBay will remove any negative or neutral feedback or item not received, stockout and item not as described (INAD) defects for the Managed Delivery transactions as long your INAD performance meets eBay’s requirements.
Simplified and faster shipping
In collaboration with our fulfillment partners, eBay will manage logistics and get your items out the door quickly and on time so you can focus on selling.
Increased visibility
Make your listings stand out—let buyers know you’ll get their purchases to them in 3 days or less.
Save storage space
Store your merchandise at a Managed Delivery center and save storage space, and costs.
eBay Managed Delivery Benefits for buyers
Speedy delivery
Buyers will receive their purchases in 3 days or less.
Quality packaging
Orders arrive in high quality, sturdy, eco-friendly eBay-branded shipping boxes.
Reliability
With 100% tracking, buyers can monitor their packages so they’ll know when to expect them.
Customer support
Quicker resolution of their transaction queries.
10 Responses
Wow, if only other marketplaces offered this sort of service, well done Ebay for coming up with this new idea, I think it might be popular.
This just might work……..
……… for Chinese sellers
Basically they are copy cat Amazon again, and are using 3rd party suppliers, unlike Amazon who spent years investment in their own network, already on a hiding to nothing..
Obviously we do not see the cost (and am sure it will be complicated it always is)…and using 3rd party will make it expensive.
All 5 years to late, but we will all wait and see.
Did they not do this is Germany????
It’s remarkable the mainstream sources covering this news as though it’s actually eBay doing the work and not simply outsourcing.
Outside of the obvious aping of Amazon, eBay’s lethargically slow-to-execute in the U.S. (even Etsy did this already) after many years of toying around, it’s unclear as to precisely which merchants “Managed Delivery” (kudos for not further ripping off Amazon and not calling it FBE?) on this long-simmering potential project of many years would actually benefit?
Growing SMBs and SMEs who sell through multiple marketplaces (and their own sites) are likely to already have their own 3PL/fulfillment partner (or their own warehouse and shipping operation).
This is an ‘operations’ endeavor, and frankly eBay sucks at execution.
Ebay doesn’t have substantive operations, logistics, supply chain, warehousing etc. bench strength and expertise in-house the way Amazon does, thus the success or failure of this initiative in many ways will depend on the 3PL(s) eBay selects as its partner(s), and thus far I haven’t seen any mention of who it/they are (although naturally Pitney Bowes has always seemed like a likely short-lister).
Those who don’t yet have the volume to justify using a fulfillment provider are almost certainly going to be better off finding their own service, rather than have eBay’s hooks deeper in their fulfillment operations and potentially limiting expansion to other channels or marketplaces, or controlling what collateral marketing material is permitted to be included in pack-out, for example).
Ebay does not pass-through any specially negotiated USPS rate savings to U.S. merchants (and presumably pockets the difference from what eBay pays to the USPS and what eBay sellers who use eBay’s labels pay to eBay) for easily accessible commercial rates any SMB has access to.
Similarly, it’s unlikely eBay is going to be able to offer extraordinarily competitive fulfillment rates as eBay is simply another intermediary middle-man who is going to expect their cut.
That is, of course, unless eBay subsidizes fulfillment rates the same way eBay subsidized their frequent sitewide flash sales last year, with the fees paid by *every* eBay seller going into a funding pool to offset Managed Delivery costs offered to eBay merchants participating in the program.
It would be interesting to know more about how eBay plan to select their fulfilment partners.
Pitney bowes has to be favourite
Is there any facts and figures on the success of the ebay global shipping programme? From memory that was with Pitney Bowes I think.
It would be interesting to see what the GSP success rate is with on time safe delivery.
I must say, we seldom have customer service issues with the GSP.
Was there any survey done to see if this is what buyers (or sellers) actually want? If yes, then this could be a good thing.
Sellers have had the ability to use 3rd party fulfilment companies for many years now. Perhaps all who want that service already use it.