eBay Premium Service is a badge to help buyers identify items from sellers that offer the best services. Sometimes however, there might be days that you can’t meet the standard and end up extending dispatch times so what do you do?
Bert Bassett is eBay Channel Manager at Optimizon, where he helps a number of clients to grow their marketplace sales. In this guest post today, he shares how to suspend shipping without losing the eBay Premium Service status. Heads up, this works at the moment but there’s no guarantee that this will work forever, but this is what Bert has discovered:
If you’re struggling with dispatch and getting parcels on time, or your carrier isn’t as reliable as before, you might be considering extending dispatch times. However, this could mean loss of eBay Premium Service if you do, losing you your badge and fee discount.
If you go to https://www.ebay.co.uk/ship/cutoff you’ll see you have the options to turn off some working days. Right now, if you do this, you don’t lose your Premium Service. What you’re saying is “when I’m working, I offer next day, free in 3 and 30 day returns…it’s just that I don’t work every day.”
It DOES change what buyers see as estimated delivery time so it might affect your sales conversion rates – it’s something to be used sparingly. I only did it initially with my account because of a shortage of postage bags that forced me to “ration” my dispatch during peak period – that was when I accidentally discovered I hadn’t lost my Premium Service
5 Responses
I have asked eBay how long it takes to recognise a change in the cut-off time but cannot obtain an answer. All of my listings show 15:00 Hrs as the daily cut off time. On the 16th Feb a neighbour asked me if I could take them for their Covid Vaccination at 14:00 Hrs which meant I would not be able to send any order between 13:30 Hrs and 15:00 Hrs. I changed the cut off time for that day only to 13:15 Hrs but when we returned there were 3 orders after 13:15 all showing as late despatch! eBay have told me that if they appear on a late delivery list they will consider removing them but surely if I change the postage cut off time this problem should not happen.
To be honest we stopped worrying about the badge and discounts long ago. So long as you have good feedback and the right prices, it appears to make little difference. Our sales have not suffered but our stress levels trying to jump through an ever increasing number of hopes for smaller and smaller rewards, certainly has gone down.
The postage system on eBay is still broken. Has been for several months. They tried to get all clever with masses of things influencing the dates, it simply doesn’t work. Right now we still have rm48, rm2r and next day courier showing the same delivery date… Been like it for a few months.
I have been promised that eBay are creating z search function for next day delivery… Well it has been over 3 months since I was official told, still nothing. Must be the only market place where such a basic thing is missing in 2021!
Oh…. And I see that RM48 is showing as ‘get it in 2 days’ still. Funny that as it is z 2 to 3 day service. Buyers will only see that bit and won’t notice the delivery estimate shown when they actually buy it… Which is 2 to 3 days.
No end of buyers complaining when 2 days go by and no delivery. You explain but they don’t care.
Very misleading by eBay and z crafty way to make deliveries look faster than they are at the buyers and sellers expense .. as always.
Sorry for the typos… I really should read back through before hitting send!
We no longer jump through the hoops set by ebay or Amazon to meet their criterior. We dont use there protions either.
We lost our seller fulfilled porime badge due to parcels arriveing late that had been shipped on time so nothing we could do and we were fed up with their pointless questions to answer asking what were we going to do to rectify. I was afraid telling them i was going to dismiss the CEO of royal mail if he did not pull his finger out was not a solution obviously.
So we justleft things. Sales did not dip at all and then we realised they still expected the 1 day dispatch so we switched everything to 2 day dispatch and guess what nothing dipped in our sales as its all still free shipping (just cheaper)
We then realised ebay charge us a set fee like everyone else for a shop which in my understanding was to show our items to potential buyers. and we would all pay the same, happy days.
Then oh no||| If you pay eBay a bit more than the other chap eBay will promote yours above their item. oh and if he promotes his giving eBay even more than you we will promote his item higher and so on till ebay get richer and the 2 of you skint yourselves.
I once rented an are of a shop window in a high street shop and never once did the owner say to me if you give me a bit more money i will actually open the curtains.
sales have remained the same on each so they can go whistle.
Adding in an extra day’s handling and crucially not marking as despatched until the last day on which Ebay says you must post, these things are your best protection against low ratings.
But appreciate the heads up about the cut off link.
Been on Ebay for 20 years and never knew it existed!