The Royal Mail fiasco on Monday without doubt disrupted shipping for many online sellers and eBay have recognised this, and to ensure you are not adversely affected, eBay will automatically protect your performance.
If you missed what happened, The Royal Mail fiasco started shortly before 9am when they said that they were investigating Click and Drop issues. They announced that orders are showing the incorrect status and announced that the service would be ‘briefly’ placed into maintenance mode while they investigated. This turned into an all day affair with full service not resumed until gone 9pm at night.
We don’t know what the cause was and based on suspending the service at 9am it’s likely that issue started earlier, potentially even on Sunday so issues might have been present for even longer than the 12 hour outage that we know of. What we do know is that this incident was unlikely to be related to the two issues they had the previous Friday and Tuesday when they couldn’t collect Amazon orders as on both occasions they indicated that this was an issue on Amazon’s side. There was no apportioning of the blame to a third party company for the all day outage.
eBay’s commitment to protect you from Monday’s Royal Mail Fiasco include:
- Automatically removing late delivery counts for transactions placed between 04/09/2021 and 06/09/2021, and checked out with a Royal Mail service.
- Any open item not received count (INR) in Service Metrics will also be automatically removed for transactions placed between the above dates, and checked out with a Royal Mail service.
- eBay will also remove any negative and neutral feedback relating to or arising from late or non delivery during this period and these cases will not impact your service metrics rating.
Note: All feedback (negative or otherwise) arising due to matters not concerning late or non-delivery during the above dates will, however, be left in.
Even though eBay may protect individual service metrics from affecting seller standard rating, if your delivery performance drops below an acceptable level or if eBay observe unusual activity on accounts, they may have to restrict account privileges (including suspending the above protections) while they investigate – You can’t use the Royal Mail as a get out of jail card if there are other issues with your service.
Finally, you may see late deliveries due to this event on your seller dashboard, but they will be removed before your next seller performance evaluation. You do not need to contact eBay Customer Service to request removal.
3 Responses
I won’t be using them again after this, this also happened on a day where I found I had over £400 of goods sat in my local Post Office for the last week. Over two hours of being on hold to Royal Mail due to this Click and Drop fiasco.
I found one parcel by accident, after following up on a customers query, as it was still stating it was at my local office, which is odd as I had paid for pickup, and should never have even arrived at my local office (they cannot process Click & Drop parcels).
During this call to their helpline, I found another three parcels were also sat there. I got back to the post office 2 minutes before closing to retrieve the other three. I then had to source a quick delivery to my customers, and wrote to all of them stating the issue and resolution. I know my experience will be a drop in the ocean compared to others.
I have yet to see my local Postie to quiz him on why they ended up at my local office in the first place!! I’m out of pocket, and still awaiting refunds from the PO.
Can you imagine if Amazon did something as drastic as protecting sellers due to Royal Mail?
That’ll be the day!
Unlike Amazon who sent us this message…….
“Your account is at risk of deactivation
A critical event has occurred with your account that has caused it to be at risk of deactivation”
Don’t they know this “critical event” was Royal Mail – do they even care?
Will never know as the only thing you can communicate with on Amazon is a bot.