The situation with the CWU and Royal Mail is impacting all ecommerce businesses that use the service, none more so than the hundreds of thousands of businesses that trade on eBay. This is a message from Murray Lambell, VP and General Manager, eBay UK, on how eBay are supporting seller through the upcoming postal strikes:
“The industrial action we’ve seen across the UK this past year has disrupted all parts of society and business. Our most important services industries – from nurses and rail workers, to university staff and teachers – have all come out in force, many with important causes.
“Postal workers have joined them in the thousands, with the first days of industrial action starting last week. I know that this had a huge impact on our sellers, inhibiting your ability to trade and putting business at a near standstill.
“With more strikes to come from the 12th November, we’re working around the clock to support eBay sellers so you can still make the most of this critical Black Friday and Christmas period.
How we’re supporting sellers
“Royal Mail will no longer be listed as our default delivery service, and we have invested in further partnerships with other delivery providers to ensure continuity of service.
“eBay will also automatically protect your performance until Friday 9th December for transactions for:
- Your late delivery rate, which will be removed for transactions with estimated delivery dates until Friday 9th December.
- Your “item not received” count in your Service Metrics dashboard will be automatically removed. eBay will also remove any negative and neutral feedback relating to or arising from late or non delivery during this period.
- As always, eBay requests that you upload tracking details when you dispatch an item. This helps to keep your buyers informed, and adding tracking details gives you additional protection.
“If you want to use Royal Mail, please note that during the days of industrial action, it will prioritise ‘Tracked 24’ and ‘Special Delivery’ services and will not be delivering letters. Royal Mail tracked services can be purchased on eBay’s label platform but eBay encourages Sellers to use alternative carriers which are also available on the platform.
Managing expectations with buyers
“eBay is activating measures to help keep buyers informed and manage expectations.
“Time will be added to buyer-facing delivery estimates and we will also notify buyers of potential delays using messaging across their experience to keep them informed and help reduce contacts.
Campaigning for a resolution
“eBay UK have joined forces with the Federation of Small Businesses, British Chambers of Commerce and Small Business Britain to call on both sides of the postal dispute to come together to find a resolution, or at the very least, delay further industrial action. We continue to review the situation and thank you for reading.”
4 Responses
All good news regarding ebay’s support. Have you considered doing what amazon do and having your own courier network? I’m not a betting man, but I would suspect this is not the end of strikes, and I would say the end of Royal Mail as a reliable partner is getting closer.
How about something really useful.
By reducing fees on low value items , only viable if sent via royal mail?
Maybe the best way to protect sellers would be to either do away with all the service metrics or at least suspend them. It’s not only RM that are affected but other postage carriers have delays as well. Wish ebay would stop trying to micro manage every aspect of sellers business.
As a business i’ve not been impacted by any service metric defect punishments but as a small business it’s a stress and worry I don’t need or want. Or have time to waste phoning ebay up to get them removed.