Last week a couple of people contacted us to say that their eBay delivery times didn’t appear to make sense and weren’t displaying as expected. We now know why – eBay delivery times have been automatically extended in some cases due to severe weather and ongoing Coronavirus impacts.
If you have noticed something strange going on with your estimated eBay delivery times, eBay are advising you not to change your handling times as they are staying in touch with carriers and the Met Office and things will return to normal as soon as the situation improves. If you manually make changes then when eBay reverse their extended estimations your manual adjustments will remain in place.
“Deliveries to some parts of the UK are potentially experiencing delays caused by severe weather and COVID related challenges on carriers including higher levels of self-isolation.
We are automatically extending estimated delivery dates as necessary to give buyers a more reasonable expectation of when their items will arrive in affected areas based on information provided by carriers and the Met Office until further notice. We recommend that you don’t extend your handling time. Our extended estimates should give you enough buffer, and additional handling days could lead to the appearance of your items being delivered slower than they actually are.
We want you to feel safe in the knowledge that we actively manage any challenges in the delivery network on a constant basis and apply extensions to buyer facing delivery estimates where necessary. We’ll continue to work closely with carriers and delivery partners to identify further impacts.”
– eBay
4 Responses
eBay estimated delivery times are a mess at the moment full stop. We use Royal Mail 48 and eBay are advising that this will arrive in 2 days, despite it being a 2-3 day service. They are also saying “arrives by” which is an impossibly – it will not arrive before that date; possibly on, but not by. And don’t get me started on delivery estimates on deliveries to the US: delivery in 7 days despite 3 week+ delays through customs in Chicago. A great lesson in how not to manage customer expectations.
The problem I face most often is eBay shortening delivery times…
I have 3 delivery options, 1-day, 2-day, and 3-day Other Courier, and sometimes the 3-5 Day Other Courier. These are not specified as any specific courier as this depends on destination/size/weight of the order, and yet despite that eBay have been adjusting delivery expectations where the longer delivery option is ‘expected’ to be delivered before the shorter delivery option, or they are extended far longer.
I already add time to cover delayed deliveries, and now eBay messes about with these delivery times by seemingly randomly adding or removing time, where a 3-Day Other Courier is supposed to deliver in less time than a 2-Day Other Courier. It makes no sense to me.
At times I wonder why sales have dropped off, then eventually realise when people complain about delivery estimates, that eBay have added several days to the delivery estimate, and I know that our delivery times are not that long.
I too have been battling with ebays rubbish delivery times since last Christmas. Been in long conversation with a person at ebay with power over such things. All credit to them, they have actaully properly engaed with me, but still the same issues.
On Friday afternoon my listings were showing RM48 with 2 day dispatch as arriving by Tuesday. Our order cut off is 10.30am. We only post mon to fri… Ebay was showing us post by Monday…. with the customer seeing delivery ‘on or before Tuesday’!
It is a complete sham. The system doesn’t recognise weekends as such, it counts them as dispact days. Then you have the listing showing rm 48 as 3 to 3 days to you… and 2 to the buyer. Now apparnatly this is because RM have told ebay RM48 is a 2 days service…. well not looking at the amount of lates we have had! plus, why show it as 2 -3 days when creating the listing?
Right now all my listings show RM48, RM24 and 24hr courier as a 2 day service. Been like it since Christmas.
The errors change depending on the day of the week, Fridays always show the wrong date by far ( rm48 delivered on tues.), but the rest of the tiem it often ignores dispatch cut of times completely and only recognises the point of the days changing.
We don’t get any of these issues with any other site… just part of the reason why our time on ebay will end after 12 years ina few months time. SAd, but we don’t have time for these avoidable issues as well as the constant flow of others.
Having the same issue with ebay at the minute as well for a lot of 2 day delivery items as showing up and arriving the same time as next day delivery items.
Try explaining it to customer service in the Far East and their suggestion is just send it out with next day shipping to meet ebay’s timeframe.
So frustrating dealing with ebay currently, any goodwill they got at the start of lockdown as long been lost.